What about when you don't get better? A disappointment observed

From my diary: May 2022

My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.

Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness.

Psalm 55:4-7

Our estate is built on the bones of an old orchard and ancient trees fill the gaps between the houses and line the gardens. It means that our street sounds like a forest. I have never been anywhere else with as much birdsong. I’m sitting at our community allotment on a stack of breeze blocks among the weeds, and the melody twists in the air around me. The warmth of the May sun settles on my eyelids and the air is full of the smell of hawthorne. Birdsong threads together like a net from house to house, suspended below the sky. Blue tits gossip between the roofs, a dove coos mournfully and a blackbird shouts at me from a chimney pot.

An allotment is a special kind of place, and ours is especially nice, tucked in between an alleyway and the turned backs of the houses who hide it from the eyes of any passers-by. It is our secret and not many know it’s here: lines of ex-concrete bags sag with soil and a quiet shed sits on the side, it’s stillness betraying none of the chaos within. I wander between the bees and the foxgloves, surprised by how much my heart lifts at the sight of our first germinated pumpkin.

There is no one about. It is lockdown quiet after the FA cup final last night, a silent Sunday morning except for the cocooning song of the birds. Just us.

Somehow it is just right, this sweet and quiet song. It does not disturb the bitter seed inside me.

My heart is swollen and tender today and I have come to try and stop trying to understand.

I need a new way to hold this pain. This aching disappointment. Trying to explain it away isn’t working.

The ragged tears of last night have left my throat soar and my eyes fussy, even now. I am still sharp with the rawness of my grief which spilt out on the floor like raw eggs. How am I supposed to clear that up? It will cover everything with slime and in a few days the smell will be unbearable.

Still, I told you the truth of my bruised heart God yesterday and that is something. You did not break it. I put it in your hands gingerly, like a water balloon.

“I don’t know what to do with this Jesus,” I said.

“You did this to me.” The words catch in my throat and pain my tongue.

You said nothing.

But then I wasn’t listening.

And this morning I still don’t want to hear it. Don’t you offer me your pity, your solution to these broken dreams. I thought I was going to be well! I dreamed I was nearly done with this.

Hope lies around my feet in slithers. Give me pat phrases or helpful comments and I will smash them at your feet like glass vases and I won’t be sorry that you wasted your niceness on me.

I am glad Jesus, that you know when I need silence. You know when I just need to feel that it’s ok to be this angry, this horrible, this sour in my soul. Maybe the water balloon has a puncture. Poison seems to be seeping out into my thinking, creeping backwards over past hope and faith like a milk-sour taste, so when I go back to find comfort all I find is an echo of today’s cynicism.

I hate past me. What an idiot I was. To believe in some kind of dream arising from the perpetual purgatory of this illness. There is no magic here, only cruel reality. And some birdsong.

A thought rises clearly in my memory. A moment from childhood. It lifts up in my head with the sound of a lawnmower and the smell of damp, matted grass. I must have been about seven, maybe eight, and I claimed a tree at the back of our garden as my own. The trunk was multiple and flexed, but you could climb up into a y-shaped pocket and look through the leaves to see the garden below. I was convinced I was hidden there. A secret place, just for me. I grew impatient waiting for my dad to build me a seat up there, so I took a hammer myself from the clematis-webbed shed and nailed a piece of wood between the prongs of the y. The wood was at the wrong angle and the corner of it grooved your bottom unless you leant back, but I made myself a back rest with a frayed piece of yellow rope. I balanced a tray in the branches beside me and lay back under the leaves. Living out my wild and unfiltered dreams of perfect peace in my hidden world. For a minute or two.

I am still on the breeze blocks.

Oh how I long for that innocence again. Restore to me a belief that a scrap of wood and an abandoned rope are enough to make the world good and whole.

The second time is bitter God. It is crueler than the first. It doesn’t have the smell of adventure. My soul is older and heavier now. I am tired of pushing people away for fear of hurting them. Afraid too that their words might crush the feeble stability I carry. How can I be a blessing like this? I want to be sunshine, not a bitter wind.

Perhaps I am neither. I am just me, with a desperate longing to climb into a tree and have it complete me. With a longing to know it’s ok to bear my swollen disappointment.

“Is it like this?” you say. And in my imagination I am looking at a grey seal, bloated on a rock, only able to roll. He is too big for a back pack and I pull him behind me in one of those toy trucks we bought for Jos when he was two.

It trundles along like a dead weight, yelping. Occasionally, it bites. And it has the biggest and saddest of eyes. As if the whole ocean lives inside them, but only the northern sea, with slate clouds, constantly moving.

“Yes,” I say, “it is like that.” And I know you have heard and you know how much I love these seals stuck on their grey grey rocks and I know you have written this down in your book and you won’t forget it, not one complaint. Not one tear is uncounted or uncaught.

The net of birdsong is not strong enough to carry me away, but it is still going, unconcerned with my seal-pulling and my body aching from this endless weight. Just an ancient hymn playing on in the trees. The birds are not bothered by my silence and refusal to join in. So I can sit on a breeze block. For a minute or two.

I wrote this a month or two ago and for all that time I carted my seal of disappointment around. I have come to, if not exactly enjoy her company, at least listen to what she has to say. Sometimes it’s not about moving on so much as holding things well, isn’t it? Letting them be, and be seen by the one who creates things and gives them their names.

I think often of the woman Jesus met who had been bleeding for twelve years.

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realised that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”

“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.

Mark 5:25-31

I carry a scrap of cloth in my coat pocket. To show him I am still waiting for him. Sometimes it hurts me to hold it.

Two nights ago I could not sleep. Without introduction, I found myself thinking again of that little girl in her wonky tree seat. I realised all at once why God showed me that moment, in the middle of my broken eggshells, the dreams I couldn’t keep.

The girl in the tree, she tells the story of an older dream. She reminds me that before the dream of being better, there was the dream of being whole. Of sitting and being part of a wild and beautiful world. The dream of magic and more, of mystery landing in our lives in ‘just-for-me’ moments. Perhaps that old dream is still out there. I realise now God has not forgotten it at least. Perhaps I can unbury it in one hand and hold the seal in the other. The dream I had before I was taught that I need more than a piece of wood and a frayed yellow rope and the One my heart loves.

I am still hanging on to my piece of cloth because I am looking for the moment that comes after the healing. Regardless of healing. The older dream. When he catches my eyes and the world lights up.

You keep track of all my sorrows.

You have collected all my tears in your bottle.

You have recorded each one in your book.

Psalm 56:8