Day 8: The Day That Got Taken

I was dressed. Hair done, makeup on, the outfit that took extra planning because it had to work for the seat and the temperature and the length of the event. My stuff was packed with everything I carry

to leave a house. I'd been looking forward to it for three weeks.

And my body said no.

Not dramatically. It rarely happens dramatically. Just a change in my stomach I've learned to read the way a farmer reads a sky, and the immediate knowledge that whatever else today was going to be, it was going to happen within twenty feet of my own bathroom. I sat there in the good clothes doing the math on how long it would take to get out of them.

If you have a chronic condition, you have your own version. The infusion that lands wrong and takes the weekend. The flare that shows up the morning of your daughter's recital. The migraine that starts while you're backing out of the driveway. The grief feels disproportionate to the event, which confuses the people who love you. It was only a lunch. It was only a church service. Why the tears.

Because it was never about the lunch. It was the discovery, again, that you don't get a vote.

James wrote to people making plans, and he didn't scold them for planning. "Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." Then he tells them what to say instead. "For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that."

James isn't describing sick people here. He's describing merchants in good health with money in hand and a solid plan. Every one of them lived under exactly the terms you're living under. The difference between them and you isn't the terms. It's that they could still believe otherwise, and you can't anymore.

That's not a small thing to lose. But be honest about what was actually lost. Your body didn't take control from you. It took the impression of control. You never had a vote, and neither does anybody else. The healthy woman who canceled nothing this year is one clot, one phone call, one set of headlights away from your exact sentence, and the only reason she isn't thinking about it is that God has mercifully let her not think about it yet.

I don't say that to frighten her. I say it because it's the only thing that points your grief somewhere useful. If your day was taken by your body, you'll spend your whole life at war with your body. If your day was never yours in the first place, and was always held by a Lord willing to say yes and willing to say no, then it wasn't taken. It was spent, by Someone with the right to spend it, on something you can't see from where you're sitting.

I still put the clothes away with a lump in my throat. Grief is the right response to a loss, and that was a loss. But there's a difference between grieving a day that was stolen and grieving a day that was withheld, and only one of those leaves you anybody to trust.