These Five Years: Part Five

Grief and rejection, near resignation, and finally, renewal.

If you’re just tuning in, hello! Thank you for being here. This is the final update in a five-part series on the last five years of my life as an unexpected novelist. Feel free to begin with the introduction and then follow along from there.

It was a Tuesday morning in the middle of February. I sat in a fast food parking lot facing a dense line of trees stripped of their leaves. Buds had yet to form on branches, safe from the clutch of that inevitable false spring.

Between careful sips of subpar coffee, I watched the clock for my appointment time. I’d started seeing my therapist again in September: a spur of the moment decision just in time for another round of challenges. Connie had retired and moved out of town, but happily agreed to meet with me monthly over FaceTime.

This was our first call since Wendell died. She listened quietly as I caught her up on things: the loss, the funeral, the sickness that then swept through our house for weeks on end. I didn’t manage an ounce of optimism, but her eyes were warm and searching. I knew she could see the inexplicable rage rippling through me.

She guided me through a practice I’d done many times since I first began working with her in 2018. With my eyes closed, I tried to sense where the anger lived in my body. Then she asked me what it looked like.

“It’s everywhere. It’s hot, but not bright like fire. Dark, swirling, and seething like an Obscurus.” I sat in the discomfort of that darkness, letting it hover behind my eyelids. My heartbeat thundered in my ears and fingertips. Beyond it, but muffled, I could hear her ask, “And what is it trying to say?”

No sooner had I said “It’s trying to protect me,” when all at once the blanketing mass crystalized and fractured into pieces, revealing what was behind it.

That’s when the tears came, forceful and unceasing.

Original artwork by our youngest, given to me on January 25. Immediately, I felt paper-thin. Whether he meant to draw me, or not, I see myself in profile.

Of course I was sad to lose Wendell.

Sad for Cliff. Sad for my-mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law, their husbands and children. Sad for our children and for me. Sad for Cliff’s cousins, aunts, and uncles and for the hundreds of people who’d formed a line out the church doors to come pay their respects.

There was another part of me sad in a way nothing could touch. It was a much younger version of myself, cheeks rounder with only a slight dusting of freckles, who’d had an ache deeper than any other for love and safety and acceptance which Wendell had offered unconditionally from the start.

I was twenty when I met him. Twenty-three when I took the last name he’d given his son. Twenty-seven when I saw him cry over his newborn granddaughter when she wrapped her tiny hand around his huge finger. I was reinvented time and again in the years that I knew him: college student, grad student, wife, higher ed admin, photographer, business owner, mother, author.

No matter what I was doing or how well I was doing it, I was always met with a full smile and his southern drawl. “We’re so proud of you,” he’d say, again and again.

With that kind of love and those words gone, I was sent hurtling through my own past, to the version of me that hadn’t ever felt enough. Enough to stay, enough to protect, enough to love, enough to cherish, enough to be proud of.

Instead of leading myself well, I was doing the same old, familiar song and dance. If I worked hard enough, for long enough, and had something to show for myself, could I somehow get back what January had taken with it? Maybe someone would be proud. Maybe I’d be enough. So I’d persisted in the work of querying which had resumed that January day he’d left us. Week after week, batch after batch, no after no.

It didn’t matter that deep down I knew there were people proud of me. What Wendell represented, to me, and his subsequent departure excavated a lie I’d believed long enough to hold it as truth. I just didn’t know I still believed it.

I was forced to reacquaint myself with the remaining vestiges of what lives in me, and the things I do, that come from the outflow of a pain I haven’t yet healed from.

I planted a garden and yet I, myself, lay fallow. I wasn’t writing, didn’t even know if I wanted to anymore. A season of loss combined with total rejection had me near resignation.

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One Monday evening in April, on a drive I make multiple times a week, I noticed something I hadn’t before. The road was new, carved through farmlands to shave minutes of our commute to another part of town. I made a u-turn and pulled over, the boys confused by our detour to pick up their sister from soccer.

“What is it mommy?” they asked, as I got out of the car to get a closer look, them following close behind.

“It looks like wheat, but I think it’s barley,” I replied, grazing my fingertips over the soft feathery awns. Something about that road cut right through a sea of verdant grain began to shift something in my heart in a way I couldn’t explain. A glimmer of a beauty I love that holds so much meaning for me, and my only response could be an unfurling.

By the end of that month, I went dark on social media, knowing something had to give. Even more than that, I let myself off all the hooks. School was slowing down. I stopped querying and telling myself I should be drafting. Four solid months in the creative dumps had put me at a crossroads, and I had some decisions to make.

In late May, it became clear that a few of the fields I thought were all barley, were actually wheat. The ones closest to home, in fact. In the ten years we’d lived in this neighborhood, I’d never once seen wheat fields right across the street. Last year, I’d had to drive to Kentucky for them. This year, they came to me, stalks growing golden by the day, my heart along with them.

I needed to spend my summer creating.

And here we come full circle, when this part of my journey returns to the very juncture at which this little newsletter of mine began just a couple of months ago. Many of you have read that first update, so for the sake of not boring you with repetition, I’ll leave this here for anyone who hasn’t, to reference:

On Learning to Fall

This summer was a powerful season of rediscovering that who I am as a writer is distinct from the work of publishing. Even though I want that and will submit myself to the process, once again, when the time is right and the work is truly ready, it’s not the foundation of the work.

The writing is the foundation. Staying attuned to my inner landscape is the foundation. Abiding in relationship to my Creator is the foundation. Looking out the window to contemplate the world and its people is the foundation.

And I’d lost sight of all of that.

I thought I’d been prepared for the rejection that was to come, even celebrated some of it, for a season. But a rejection and grief cocktail was too much for me, a cup I could bear, no longer, to drink. In the end, it was not quitting writing, but letting go of striving that released me to gather back up my fractured sense of enough-ness.

I am a writer and will always be.

I have stories to tell, more than ever before. This summer I filled notebooks with ideas and visions of stories that I know matter, even if only to me. Characters and scenes I hold in compartments in my mind, a whole bevy of questions I have to ask about who they are, what they’re doing, and what they’d like to say to me.

I only need time to tell the stories. Time I’m learning to take.

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The morning I restarted The Artist’s Way in June, I woke before the sun to watch it rise over the fields unexpectedly gifted to me. Of all the mornings I’d set out on a new beginning, of sorts, it was the closest the almost full moon’s set would be to the sherbet sun’s rise over those golden stalks of wheat.

For just a few minutes they hovered in the sky at opposite ends in my view of the horizon. It was the surprise of the summer. A day earlier or later and it wouldn’t have happened that way. But it did, and it was beyond my control.

The moon is on the right, to the silo’s left, just above the darker trees. Zoom in and you can see it there, faintly.

The best things, as I’ve learned on this journey, usually are.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being here.

Thank you for the parts you’ve read, shared, commented on, emailed or messaged me about. It’s been a joy, a challenge, and a privilege to share these reflections with you knowing the work ahead is just as important as what lies behind — is as important as what is right here in front of me, too.

This process was more difficult as I drew nearer to now, the lessons less tidy, less clear, less certain. But that doesn't make them any less valuable, I know. The practice alone of returning here, week after week, has helped clarify the work of revision, of drafting further, of outlining new stories, and I’m grateful for every second of it.

Thank you for being a part of that.

Until next time,