Dancing on Holy Ground
My sister's brain was damaged by a case of meningitis, a swelling of the brain and spinal cord that came out of nowhere when she was eleven and I was nine.
When I was ten years old, I'd often lie awake late into the night, sweating, wondering if I'd notice if I had rabies, or maybe brain cancer, the plague, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or if I'd be able to tell the difference between the sound of the trains that ran on the tracks a quarter mile behind my house, and tornadoes, which sometimes share the same calling card, a low, rhythmic rumble that belies their potential to kill.
The meningitis that scarred Julie's brain started out as an innocuous case of strep throat, a normal sick day for a schoolchild, nothing more than a low rumble.
For her first eleven years, Julie was happy and healthy. She helped me learn my letters when I was a toddler, and then at age nine I watched as she herself learned to walk and talk again after her brush with death, a warped echo of our earlier years.
After, she struggled immensely. Epilepsy, with seizures about daily for years. Decreased short term memory abilities. Depression, bad. Wild mood swings. She was barely recognizable to me despite living in the same exterior as my sister. To my eyes, Julie was gone.
I was young and was slammed with one of the hardest truths of existence: that things change. That things I loved were not guaranteed to remain tomorrow. That anything and everything can be taken away at a moment's notice. So I stayed awake and worried about things that were deadly.
I've been grappling with this existential ephemerality, this cosmic unsafeness, for my whole life since then. I may lose anything at any time. I will lose everything eventually.
Recently, I have been meditating on the words of Jeff Foster, which I am mildly embarrassed to admit I found on one of those Instagram accounts dedicated to motivational quotes.
But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost.
When I was ten, I could only see that the ground was unstable, and I didn't know what might cause me or anything that I loved to plunge beneath it.
But time has a way of changing things. As the years passed and I've grown, I've slowly found the courage to remove my head from the sand and look around. I've noticed that there are still many things to be grateful for. And that when things go away, I still end up okay in the end. Maybe worse for the wear at first, but eventually the pain of losing gets kintsugi'd into me and I often end up even more beautiful than I was before.
Surely the sands will shift, and it's hard to tell when a tornado might come through and blow it all away. But for the moment, I feel the earth, solid under me. And I choose to dance on this holy ground.
