'Matter Matters'
It happened fast. A bite of an hours-old donut turned my stomach, and within minutes I was doubled over in excruciating, unrelenting stomach pain. I phoned my husband, just a few feet away in the other room. “I feel like I’m dying,” I whispered into the phone. He loves me, believes me, but also knows I’m prone to exaggeration. But in that moment, discovering me crying and bent over on all fours, he knew (more than I even did) it wasn’t a case of one too many gourmet donuts.
It’s been a few days; I’m now appendix-less. A terrifying few hours resulted in emergency surgery and a not-quite overnight stay in a hospital bed. Thinking back on it, I can’t help but see it as a small thing that could have been disastrous had I followed my own instincts (i.e. attempting to ignore the pain with ibuprofen and sleep). In my drugged state, I (apparently) told Jordan we should update our will. I grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go, had a near panic attack when the doctor burst in and said: “your white blood cell count is high.” In our humanity, we tend to collapse into extremity and fear. The “what ifs” take over the rational parts of the brain.
In “The Rock That is Higher,” Madeleine L’Engle reminds her readers: “Matter matters.” Our little traumas, our deeply-hidden wounds, our bigger battles, and life-altering illnesses and injuries matter because our embodied bodies matter. L’Engle wrote this book during her recovery from a brutal car crash that left her isolated, horrifically battered and injured. Though I can’t imagine the severity of what she endured, I’ve been reflecting on her reminder of the balm of story in trying and scary times. “When I falter and fear I turn to story to return me to light,” she writes.
Recovery led L’Engle to pen a book about far more than her physical trials. The physical trials pointed her to Truth, illuminated the sanctity and beauty of community and communion. “True story calls us to be a part of the universe as it heals us,” she writes. Perhaps as a writer this is even more true. Eventually we writers write about the things that happen to us, because writing is processing, the telling of our stories is often healing.
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Later, Jordan told me he was scared. The sudden onslaught of pain, followed by the emergency surgery took a toll. He dealt with the stress by taking dutiful notes, creating a timeline from the moment we arrived at the ER to the minute we left 12 hours later. We are bonded, him and I. My pain is his pain, my struggle his struggle. Matter matters; the small organs and deeply rooted fears, the big struggles and little griefs. It all matters.