when sadness (still) lingers

and lingers and lingers

Jun 20, 2024

This summer, I am sharing only old writing in what I’m calling the “summer of nostalgia for everything not trending.” This piece is from July 2023 and has been, to date, one of my most read pieces. I didn’t make any edits to it, and it was originally published on Substack. In reading it back, I’m amazed at how different and similar I still feel. Time can heal us and shift our perspectives. But sometimes, it can’t. Sometimes the pain is still there, though it’s less sharp, even after many summers.

when sadness (still) lingers

On this day one year ago, I was wandering the halls of a hospital in search of my sister. I forgot it was a holiday, only remembering when the machine in the parking garage wouldn’t take my money. “Happy holiday” flashed across the screen. I only realized the date when I saw the tiny flags taped to the nursing station desk, when the doctor told my sister she might be able to see the fireworks from the window in her room.

My husband and I had driven through the night. Twenty-four hours earlier and we’d been celebrating our anniversary, shopping at an outdoor mall, drinking iced coffees in the sun. It seemed so superficial after the fact, us trying on new clothes in Madewell and throwing pennies into the water fountain. We had takeout pizza for dinner and left our shopping bags in the corner of the bedroom to unpack the next day, not knowing six weeks would pass before we’d finally pull off the tags and hang the clothes in our closet.

The drive from Los Angeles to Sacramento felt desperately long as we watched the stars fade from the sky and listened to podcasts about my sister’s diagnosis. I wanted to be prepared, to know how to talk with the doctors about protocols and question them about treatments when needed.

The numbness in her limbs had started a few days before. There was a startling concern in her voice when she called me and said she’d gone to the emergency room. The doctors had initially sent her away, not knowing what to make of her symptoms. But then my sister started struggling to breathe. They rushed her to a different hospital, where a neurosurgeon from San Francisco was video conferenced in. Guillain-Barré syndrome was the diagnosis. A condition in which the body attacks the nervous system, often resulting in complete paralysis. We were driving up north a few hours later.

The covid protocols were strict and so it was just her husband and me that first day. Only two visitors allowed and only during daytime hours. She was sleeping, or at least that’s what I remember. I didn’t recognize her at first—I think that must be everyone’s fear when they find out a loved one is in the hospital, the moment you first walk into the room. What will they look like? What machines will be keeping their body alive? Will they know who I am, remember anything?

When my sister opened her eyes and saw me, she smiled slightly, the way someone who is sick and tired and pumped full of pain medication does. I was just relieved to see she was still her. Sick and in pain, but still my sister, still laughing at her husband’s jokes, still bossing nurses around and advocating for herself better than I’ve ever known how.

I cared for her as best I could during those first few days, tossing out hospital food and bringing fruit from the co-op down the street, placing vases of sunflowers in her peripheral, brushing her hair and braiding it. None of it ever felt like enough, which I guess is something you learn when caretaking. It always feels helpless. You reach for whatever you can and try to make things better. But better means not being in the hospital; better means going home and not needing the help.

I didn’t know then, but I was also pregnant and about to have a miscarriage, after eighteen months of trying, after more than a year of battling my own body and hating its inability to conceive. My sister would check out of the hospital in a few weeks, making a mostly full recovery, and then I would check myself in at my OB’s instructions. They feared an ectopic pregnancy. For six hours, I would sit on the edge of a bed in the emergency room waiting on blood tests and ultrasound results. I would beg God to save the baby and give us hope after all the darkness. But there was no hope to be found. The doctors sent me home at dawn with instructions to “just wait to bleed.”

I’m not sure why I’m writing about any of this today, on a holiday where I should be at the beach or on a camp trip or at least outside. Perhaps it’s to process; perhaps it’s a way to mark the moments of last summer. All I know is that I woke up feeling heavy, my body remembering the pain of my sister, the pain of my family, the pain of my womb.

In some ways, last summer changed me and shifted the trajectory of who I was becoming. This was the case for my sister as well, and I’ve watched over the past twelve months as she’s tried to put the pieces back together and figure out a new way forward. While her physical body has healed by western medicine standards, sickness marks you and becomes a part of your story. You have to learn to live with it. Your entire world suddenly becomes foreign, your body a stranger. You must relearn. Rediscover. Find a way to make a new home.

I think too that sadness has no ending, and last summer, there was a lot of sadness. It remains present, even on a holiday, even when the sun shines and laughter strings conversations. I am desperate for this not to be the case—for myself and my family but also because I know others don’t always understand the reliving and retelling of past heartaches. It’s been a year, we think. Move on, move forward, or at least stop talking about it.

But few people have the luxury of deciding when the hurting stops. Most of us must learn how to coexist, to hold space for light and darkness, and to recognize that even when the sadness no longer consumes us, it continues to linger. Time is irrelevant. The things we go through build us and break us. We change. We become scarred. We move forward as different people, different versions of ourselves than before. This is perhaps what it means to live.

The sadness of last summer still lingers a year later. That is the truth. Partly. But what is also true is that a year has passed and I am still here. So is my sister. We are changed and linked and have become both softened and hardened by our experiences. I’m not always sure what to make of that but right now it feels like something to be proud of. To celebrate even. We’ve found our way forward, even if it doesn’t always feel like it, even if we’ve needed others to lean on and carry us. And that makes me hopeful for what comes next—not because we have healed or forgotten or found our footing because we haven’t. But because we’ve made it through the year.

We’ve made it.

Feelings Not Aside

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