remaining
On the wall in my parents’ living room, our families run in long, hand-linked lines, crooked stretched branches of our family tree running across a grassy field, caught hurrying away from sunset, or so it seems, but really—I remember—we were only trying to distract our children from the family photography. Perpetual motion machines, children, as if instinctively they know we’re movers moving on a moving planet, pilgrims plodding toward a promise, as if the rebellion that ruined our remaining, that Story, has already been written into their squirmy bodies. They were still so young then, our children, flaxen-haired and brown-skinned. That year Adam had made a game of throwing his favorite stuffed Curious George as high as possible into the air—releasing it up, up, up, then thrilling over its topsy-turvy return to him, and so, we let him do that in one of the pictures, just to get him to stay.
From my chair at Mom’s and Dad’s little table where we gather now to share a last breakfast before Kevin and I and our young adults travel home, I can see those pictures from years ago, all of us caught on the run. They draw my eye. I’m attracted to the irony, I think, that those stills capture us in motion, but that in doing so, they have frozen us in time. But isn’t that the conundrum, really, of living here, learning how, as transient travelers, also to abide? Captured by the coming and going, we bear out in our bodies a childish struggle against being still, and yet I have this longing, deep in my soul, just to stop moving about and be home.
A song written in the early eighties and sung, ironically, by a band called The Clash, articulated with one relational question the timeless, unsettled confusion of our broken hearts,
You gotta let me know, should I stay or should I go?
From prison paralysis, missionary-mover Paul articulated a similar tension,
I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain…
It is interesting to me that on the eve of the crucifixion, which for those nearest represented traumatic loss, Jesus talks to his disciples–whom He has expressly chosen and cultivated for going and telling–about remaining. Remain in me, as I remain in you. He had been telling them that His going would precede their own, that they would be scattered, and painfully, where I am going you cannot follow. He had been telling them they’d face trouble, including persecution and even death, and His greatest preparation for all that anticipation, which He repeated multiple times during their last supper and walk to the Mount of Olives, was, above all else, to remain.
There is a kind of staying, an abiding with God, that happens even as we go to and from, and maybe the ability to do both at once is part of the grand miracle the Holy Spirit powerfully works in us that is beyond our ask and imagination.
Scientists have documented—did you know—a phenomenon called fetal microchimerism, that some of a baby’s cells, which are transferred to the mother during pregnancy, can persist in the mother’s tissues for decades after the birth of baby. Baby leaves the womb, but also somehow stays and lives there, too. Something jerks my head around to look over my shoulder into the kitchen, which is right now at my back, where Riley, caught in motion, is suddenly snagged by a seizure.
There’s a rip, really, in our momentum, that’s what I’m thinking, but love is the seal that propels, even as it holds.
I rise from the table and go into the kitchen, Mom and Dad’s kitchen with the black vinyl floor and the mug trees that seem to grow up out of the countertop and the dishwasher squeezed in right next to the sink, and I wrap my arms around Riley, who has suddenly frozen midstep, eyes locked somewhere vaguely in the distance.
I’m always reminded, when Riley has seizures, of those strange film scenes wherein a character standing somehow outside of time walks around in a world where no one else seems to be moving at all, or anyway, they move faster through time than anyone else and so it seems like everyone else is slowed statue-still. Maybe I think of this because when she’s frozen in place by a seizure, except for her throat clicking for breath like a metronome, all I can think of is her transience, and mine. We are vapors. I want to slow myself statue-still and just be with her until she begins to move again, and so I do. Seizures are little departures, and like Elisha with Elijah, I just want to witness hers.
Isn’t it interesting that we humans think of stillness as a kind of death, even though God seems insistent that ceasing, at least in Him, is the only way to truly live.
“Is she okay?” My mom asks, but then, realizing what is happening even as I say the words out loud—she’s having a seizure, stops and wraps her own arms around both of us.
“Rilo, come back to us,” we say, coaxing her in tandem–remain, we want you to remain, knowing that somewhere beyond the entrapment of the seizure, she can hear us. In her mind, she will move toward our voices. This has been documented too, that people experiencing epilepsy come out of their seizures more quickly when the people they love call their name.
This is only a shadow, this love of ours for Riley, of the Greater Love always pleading with our departed selves, come to me. Come back to me. Come and see. He grieves us, wanting us to return, to re-engage, to remain.
Thirty seconds maybe, each one long for us standing with her outside of time, and finally Riley returns. She gasps, like she’s coming suddenly awake, shrugging off the dreamy grip of a deep sleep.
“Yeah, sometimes I have seizures too, and my mind just goes blank and dark for a little bit,” Josh comments from the table, reaching toward Riley with his eyes. Another minute or two and she’ll take her place back over there beside him, and he’ll softly say hi Rilo every minute or so for a little while just to hear her respond.
Life isn’t short, it’s long, one of the characters in my new favorite Fredrik Backman book argues, and I get it, because nothing slows time like losing your grip, even for just thirty seconds, on someone you love, but also nothing stretches time like the ties of love that extend beyond it. Love is eternal, but time, at least as a measure of finitude, will one day loose its hold, and we will remain with God and go on with Him forever.
4 months maybe since Riley’s last seizure, long enough to lull me into some false sense of security, long enough to make me stop anticipating the next departure, and as I think on this it strikes me that Christ’s language for us, a people always on the move, is language I understand. I open my arms as Riley reanimates, as I feel her wanting to resume whatever she was doing before the seizure stopped her still, but my heartbeat-thought as I watch her thrums like a pulse.
Remain with me, even as I remain with you.
Mom opens her arms too, but she leans toward me and whispers again in my ear, “Is she okay?”
This is how I know her heartbeat-thoughts for Riley match my own.
These days Mom and Dad talk a lot about moving on, as though right in front of us they’re sneaking sideways toward an invisible departure gate. I watch them shuffle from room to room, their bodies curling closer toward the ground, and I want to call to them too, hey, come back to me. I want to wrap my arms around and urge them to remain, even as they seem all too prepared to go.
“I hate this part,” my mom says now, as we leave our breakfast behind and try to let Riley alone just to live, as we walk around Mom’s and Dad’s house gathering things for packing, changing the sheets on the beds, talking about food Mom has in her freezer that might be of some use to us. “I hate this part,” Mom says again, meaning the leaving, the being away from each other–our departure for home coming, and I nod, agreeing that I do too.
She continues her thought, says, “Wouldn’t it just be great if we all just lived close?”
Should I stay or should I go? That old song still croons, absurdly unraveling in my mind, and smiling to think of the realest real, I glance at Mom and grin, saying only, yes, thinking that love alone makes it true: We can all just live close, even while we don’t.
