The One Nobody Remembered To Ask

Two years, and the question has never once come to her.

It comes to her mother, from everybody, constantly, and rightly. How are you doing. How was the scan. How did you sleep. It comes to her brother when he flies in for the weekend, because people are impressed that he flew in. It comes to the dog, in the voice people use for dogs, and she has stood in the kitchen and watched a visitor ask the dog how it is holding up, and gone on drying a plate.

She has driven ninety one round trips to the hospital. She knows which door has the ramp. She knows the parking machine takes cards on Tuesdays and does not on Sundays, which is not a thing anybody should have to know.

And last month somebody at the church door held her arm and said, warmly, you are so steady. Your mother is lucky to have you. And she said thank you, and she got in the car, and she sat in the lot for a while and could not have told you what she was feeling, because there has not been room to feel anything for two years and it is not a thing you can just switch back on because a stranger touched your arm.

I want to name that before anything else, because everyone else has skipped it. Nobody asked you. For two years. That is a wound, and it is not a small one, and it does not become smaller because the reason for it was somebody else's illness.

You have your own version. Different corridor, different machine, same silence where the question should be.

The cost, counted, before anybody calls it steadiness

It cost you two years of your thirties. It cost you the friendships that quietly thinned because you kept canceling. It cost you the ordinary right to have a bad day out loud, because a bad day out loud would frighten your mother, and then you would have to take care of her about being frightened, and there has never been anything left for that.

And it cost you the question. That is the one nobody counts. Being unasked for two years does something to a person that being tired does not.

You have been going unasked for two years, and heaven has not once mistaken your silence for not needing anything. Psalm 56:8 says our wanderings are counted and our tears are put in His bottle and written in His book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old line about tears in a bottle and makes it a hand on a shoulder in a parking lot. He has been asking. You have just been too busy holding a plate to hear it.

The shade is the explanation, and the shade is invisible

There is one line built for a woman who has been standing in the heat for two years.

You have been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat.Isaiah 25:4

Read who the verse is about, and let the Holy Spirit slow you down over it. Not the person standing up in the heat. The shade. The whole sentence is a list of what God is for people who had nothing left, and the one thing it never once does is compliment the person who survived. That is not an accident. Scripture is careful about this in a way that church doors are not.

You are standing in shade right now, and standing in shade is what that woman at the door was calling steadiness. That is not me being nice about you. The written word makes the refuge and the shadow the subject of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping a daughter upright in a summer her own reserves ran out in. Nobody at that door thanked the right one. Nobody at any door can see shade.

And this has to be said, or the whole thing turns cruel. Your mother's illness is not a display. It was not arranged so that a congregation could learn something from watching you cope. God did not make her sick to make a point about you. You are not an exhibit and you never were, and neither is she.

Two things a woman nobody has asked has to hear

The first is that God still shelters people. Not sheltered, once, in a poetic older world. Shelters, present tense, on Tuesday, in a hospital lot. If the shadow from the heat is only a lovely metaphor, then this is only unusually good coping, the church door had it right, and there is nowhere to put ninety one round trips.

The second is that the shade is over her. Now. Not over daughters with more support. Not over people whose brothers live closer.

You have a shelter that was given to you rather than earned by you, and it does not lift on the days you arrive with nothing. Isaiah 40:11 says He gathers the lambs with His arm and gently leads the ones that are with young, and it is His Spirit who makes gently leads a thing a body can feel rather than a thing a mind concedes.

One plain sentence before we go further. If the flatness has gone somewhere darker, if there are hours where staying is hard work, please say it out loud today to one real person, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you call anybody else. That is not the shade failing. That is the shade arriving with hands and a telephone, and reaching for it is obedience rather than giving up.