Life: It's Harder than You'd Think

Not long ago, my sister forwarded me an article written by a single mother to a child with a rare genetic disorder.  The article provided a look into what it feels like to parent a child with special needs and offered advice about ways to support friends who find themselves in that position.  It was valuable to me since my niece Juliet has an extremely rare genetic disorder (Costello's Syndrome) and my sister lives with all kinds of challenges that I am not otherwise familiar with, but what surprised me most about the article was that I knew the author.

She was a college classmate of mine.  I didn't know her well.  We had some friends in common, none of whom I happen to be in close touch with these days.  So, I hadn't heard that she was now raising a little boy with serious developmental delays on her own.  When I read the article, a memory flashed to the surface--just an image of her picking up a tray from the salad bar in the dining hall.  She wore a red wool coat, I think, and had her hair twisted up with a kind of casual elegance that would suit a romantic heroine.  Her prettiness was sort of legendary--while it's superficial to remember that she was one of the prettiest girls in our class, it's probably one reason that I knew who she was.  Anyway, when I read the article and remembered her, I felt this surge of overwhelming compassion for that lovely young girl, who would work hard in college and head off to a top law school full of promise and ambition and expectation, and who I'm sure never anticipated the particular forms of grief and sorrow she would have to fight through in order to have a life that would be nevertheless full of hard-won joy.

Also, in the last couple of weeks, Sam and I went to two weddings of former students.  At both of them, the brides were radiant, adorned in jewels and bedecked in tastefully splendid satin and lace and tulle.  The grooms were beaming with pride and gratitude and hope.  And as I witnessed the wedding of these souls each to the other, one of the prayers I felt lift from me for them was that they would endure with grace the suffering that is certain to come at them.

Maybe that's a really dark prayer, and not very festive for a celebratory occasion.  But even in my relatively limited experience of marriage (we are 8 years in), I feel like such enduring grace is, indeed, a gift very much worth having.

Before I got married, when I occasionally talked with a dear older friend about one person or another whom I was dating or considering dating, she would say, "Marriage is very long."  I understood what she was saying in a sense--that in addition to the eternal significance of marriage (its effect on the state of one's soul and one's pursuit of God, for example), life itself is long and a partner should be chosen with that in mind.

Still, while I understood marriage to be defined by its permanence, I didn't understand then how the length of it defines so much about the way it is lived out.  I probably had enough sense to realize that I should choose a person of faith and character, someone driven toward God and guided toward righteousness on his own terms (i.e., not as a form of courtship or some kind of mating dance).  And yet, I didn't realize how much of life would involve unexpected suffering and disorienting change, some of which would need to be negotiated very fast without a lot of time for considered, loving discussion.  I should add here that Sam and I have not experienced the worst of suffering; our losses are minor compared to those of others we know.  But even thinking of how to come alongside them in their suffering, or being faced with our own questions, both moral and practical, that had no obvious answer but that needed to be addressed right away--in these things, again and again, I have been humbled to see over and over again that my husband is a better man than I knew and a kinder and wiser person than I am in so many ways.

I think about the people I considered marrying before him, particularly in a case or two where I was so certain that my love for them was enough to sort of help them along, and I feel certain that I narrowly escaped disaster.  My belief in my own abilities in that regard now strikes me as not only foolish, but also full of hubris; how could I save someone else?  And why should I think that someone else would really want me to?  (If he'd wanted to be "saved," he'd already have been, I now think.)  I think I underestimated how hard it would be at times to make decisions and how crucial it would be that my husband and I were independently guided by the same principles and the same hand.

Just before Joshua was born (literally hours before he was born), Sam and I had to make a very big decision together, and we didn't have a lot of time.  It was a situation where a lot was on the line, and I found myself without any instinctive sense of direction, baffled to an almost unprecedented degree.  I now think that that cluelessness was a gift because in its absence, Sam worked through some instincts and feelings and desires and goals of his own, and those brought us into what I now feel certain was the right decision.  In other instances, I've been anxious about something and he comes at the question from a different angle, and it is uniquely comforting because I know that his perspective derives from the same truths that I acknowledge, from a reverence for the same God that I worship.  And at still other times, we've disagreed in most exasperated tones and resented each other's stubbornness and yet I've never had to truly fear even what I believed would be a misguided decision on his part because I've known that on all the foundational things, his footing was as sure as mine, or surer.

Robert Frost has this fantastic poem, "The Trial by Existence." The premise of the poem is that in heaven, all the souls awaken from death, believing they're assembled for their reward, and they discover that God is reading out new lives, and they can volunteer to return to life to live them out.  The bravest souls cry out that they'll take the hardest lives, and then God tells them that the pain of mortality is the absence of knowing that you yourself have chosen this life; the work of valor is to be brave without that comfort.  The poem presents a kind of paradox, because it suggests that bravery means persisting without knowledge of the divine context or foreknowledge of the outcomes of our lives, but the poem itself presents that very knowledge.  And so ultimately, I think the poem points to faith in precisely that which we cannot see, as the key to what makes valor possible.

As a Christian, it strikes me that the hardest part is still the same as what Frost describes: to remember how our lives are divinely situated and ordained.  To live with the knowledge that our ultimate future is secured, even if we don't know what our more immediate prospects hold.  And so what I'd say to my younger self is this, if only the giving away of the ending wouldn't circumvent the very work needed to get there: Your life is going to be harder than you think, your losses potentially greater, your personal resources more stretched, your character more vulnerable, your experiences more humbling.  Don't even think about binding yourself to someone broken; you'll need more from your husband than you could ever guess.  And he's out there, with the three children that you could only make with him.