A Creeping Gloom

 

It came right in the middle of a good day. I was caught off guard. There it was, a gloominess I didn’t understand. Gloom crept out from the corners of my experience and gradually crawled up my back and clung to me. It was like walking into the edge of a large spider’s web. At first you are wildly brushing it off only to find you have been taken over by the whole of it. I tried to retrace the steps of this gloom mood to discover where it came from. What triggered this icky grayness? Over the weekend there were wonderful experiences – times when I forgot all about it, as if it had crawled off to find another victim. But during the lull of a quiet moment it would edge back towards me holding on tight.

My mind scrolls through lists of what may have sent gloom an invitation to join me. There were little losses and limits in life; but I don’t think they invited the weight of this gloom. Sometimes – no, often – we live in the middle of hard things and do not recognize their impact. I find it easier to look for a scapegoat or find an escape route through Pinterest, Instagram, and books. These are not soulful routes.

So this morning I prayerfully reclined before the Lord. He gave my gloominess a name. It is sadness. Yes, I have reasons to be sad. Living daily in the presence of dying is sad. I am not talking about death in general; it is the daily watch of a life shrinking. It is witnessing the energy of life ebbing out of a loved one. It is knowing what approaches but swinging back and forth on the rope of in-between. There is daily tension carrying with it weariness and sadness. The soul leaving the finite for the eternal finds it’s body broken down bit by bit on the way. We are witnesses to this in care-giving.

This is hard on the passenger. And it takes a toll on care-givers as they watch the body let go while they wait. Yes, the gloom grows and shrinks and grows again. Sitting in the quiet of the morning with the Lord sharing in my sadness, I recognized He is the One who holds all of our feelings. And He is the One who made us able to hold sadness alongside other feelings. I do not need to allow the sadness to consume me; I am held by my Creator even in sadness. And because of this I still encounter beauty, joy, laughter, hope, love, peace, and so many other life experiences. I am not just experiencing sadness. I love that God made us able to hold both uncomfortable feelings and hard experiences alongside comfortable feelings and lovely experiences.

Each care-giver witnessing this decline deals with it differently. Not everyone wants to talk about it. I am learning how to process my own feelings. First I had to identify and name my feelings. The gloomy mood clinging to me felt vague and unnecessary. Sadness makes more sense and I am okay letting sadness ride along in the process.

Let’s not forget how this observation of one finishing up this life on earth shakes up my thinking about my own ending. I am in the Autumn of life. In my maternal grandma’s family Autumn can last a long time. But the length of this season will not be known until I am finished here. I am in a good place in life. I have a truer sense of who I am in Christ and the gifts He has given me to serve. I am excited about the work I do with people and about writing. But I tire out quicker at 62 than I did at 22. Our bodies change. I don’t want to run down before I have run out. Or I should say I hope to run out in doing what I love to do before my body completely runs down. None of us knows when that time will be.

So here I am talking about something many don’t like to talk about. Maybe you don’t like this conversation. I am sorry if this is uncomfortable. I need to talk about it and prefer preparing. I like how Jean Fleming writes about this time of life in her book, Pursue the Intentional Life. “This can be my time of greatest growth in Christ, the final stretch to the finish line, a time to put away every stale and self-protective barrier and make a dash for the tape. My best years, my richest insights, a time of quiet fruitfulness, various and ripe – my deepest experiences of Christ are still ahead of me. This is my eager expectation. This is my time of ripened fruit and flight, living increasingly in the reality of the resurrection life, my heart and mind set on things above, earnest and ready, expectant and alert” (p. 37).

Invested in the care of one whose last thread of life is about to break and release him into eternity prompts me to think about how I want this season in my life to look, to make it count for all its worth, and be intentional in the way I live and love. Care-giving is an opportunity to pause on the precipice of this assumed season in my life and plan for how I want to live it and how to prepare that I might die well, whatever it looks like. And in between here and there I want to be conscious of spending my time on the best things and not on the lesser.