"We have plans"
On moving toward the future with defiance and hope
Today I want to talk with you about that dark valley of illness, when the uncertainty of what’s ahead in the fog, what might or might not be coming, becomes alarmingly acute. The dread of the unknowing is palpable. It crawls on your skin and unsettles your stomach. It sends worrying story lines running through your mind at all hours of the day and night. It clouds the present.
(Before you close this window — Brianne, this is not what I need on this Sunday! — there is a beautiful and joyful story embedded in this newsletter, despite this dark beginning, I promise.)
The fog of unknowing can descend when a diagnosis is serious. It can descend in a chronic illness after years of coping, when the next bend on the path is a new territory of briars.
What will happen next?
What will the next week bring?
How can I see ahead to next month, much less next year?
The wondrous Kate Bowler writes about this in No Cure for Being Human, describing a scene after she was diagnosed at age 35 with Stage IV cancer:
“A friend came back from Australia with a year’s worth of adventures to tell and ended with a breathless, ‘You have to go there sometime!’ Then he lapsed into silence, seeming to remember suddenly that, at that very moment, I was in the hospital. And I didn’t know how to say the future was like a language I didn’t speak anymore.”
Future was like a language I didn’t speak anymore.
Exactly.
None of us really have any guarantees about a year from now, or even a day from now. But we operate as if we do, and, like the sun always rises, so far, it has always been true.
We move ahead, on healthy days, as if we have all the time in the world. We speak in the language of the future.
But a swerve in the journey of wellness and illness changes that. It is a giant billboard, a flashing alarm spotlight on our own mortality, and perhaps more keenly, the uncertainty of how many exactly days are remaining.
All plans, written in the language of the future, can ground to a halt.
I remember feeling this acutely during a few moments of my own life. The overwhelming mystery of what would happen next, and the hesitation to plan anything. It was too much, to be disappointed. It was too much, to hope. It was too much, to turn away from what was happening. The trip? The RSVP? Who knew? I did not.
But that’s not the only way to approach the fog.
As with so much, we have more choices than often appears.
I was thinking of Kate’s words, about not knowing how to speak the language of the future, on the day I learned that Suleika and Jon had gotten secretly married.
Suleika and Jon got married!
!!!!!!!!!
Congratulations, Suleika and Jon!
That’s Suleika Jaouad, journalist and author of Between Two Kingdoms, a marvelous memoir I shared with you in a previous Odyssey newsletter, along with her wonderful Isolation Journals community, and Jon Batiste, the boy she met in band camp when they were teenagers and who won the Grammy for Album of the Year this week. They’ve been together for 8 years. Suleika, who wrote about having cancer in her 20s for The New York Times. She had been in remission for years. And then the leukemia returned this winter.
(I don’t know them personally, I should add, only in the way that we all know our favorite writers and artists, that amazing illusion in which strangers feel close and familiar, like friends, because of how generously they share their lives.)
It came out this week that Suleika and Jon got married in February, the day before Suleika had her bone marrow transplant.
Here’s a clip of them talking about it on CBS Sunday Morning, 3 minutes that are as beautiful and memorable as anything I’ve ever watched on TV:
Jon explains:
“OK, this is happening. But this isn’t going to interrupt the plan that we had.
We have a plan.
We are moving towards a plan, and this is just a bump in the road.”
CBS’ John Axelrod elaborates: “And something like getting married can be an act of optimism, an act of declaration, an act of ‘We have a future’.’”
Yes,” Jon agrees. He goes on:
“It’s an act of defiance. The darkness will try to overtake you, but just turn on the light. Focus on the light. Hold onto the light.”
Oh.
Oh.
I was in tears listening to this.
We have plans.
And as Suleika said:
“To me, this is so much of life: holding the really beautiful things and the deeply cruel, profoundly hard things in the same palm.”
Making plans, in a sense, is always an act of defiance.
On an ordinary Tuesday, we don’t think of plans like that, because it is inconvenient to ignore the truth that we will be gone some day, and it could be today or tomorrow.
How could we function with that thought in the forefront of our minds every minute? How could we possibly plan? How could we speak the language of the future?
But to be reminded, in stark, unavoidable terms, of our human inevitability and uncertainty, and to keep moving, as best possible, toward the future?
That seems as beautiful as anything in life.
I cannot help but think about plans now, my own plans. What are your plans? What do you wish to be moving toward? What’s holding you back? Can you move ahead now, in some way? Can you hold this time in your hand, let the uncertainty hover, the unknowing sink in, and keep going?
We have plans.
To our journeys, with extra love and hope today,
Brianne