Be the Good

I just started a new job in August and one of the things that is more true about me than ever is that I write to process my thoughts. I use a pen and paper like I'm in third grade again to write what I see in a kid, look at it on paper, to try to help me figure out what I'm working with. I hand write my treatment plans when I'm struggling, I write down feedback given to me. Because it helps me process.

Which is why, it's midnight, and I'm awake. (If you know me you know this is surprising.) I've been in bed every night this week by 7 thanks to that new job and some PM Tylenol (that's what happens when you work in pediatrics and tiny humans sneeze right in your cornea). But here we are, I'm tossing and turning, because I read the obituary of a guy I graduated high school with today, and I just can't process it.

A guy who, if my math is right, wasn't even 26 yet. Wasn't even old enough he had to be on his own insurance. His 'survived by' list the longest part. Which, we all know, is just a list of people who never thought they'd have to say goodbye to a son, brother, and a friend.

I write to process my thoughts... but even then, they don't make any sense.

Next September will be the ten year anniversary of the day my class lost one of our own for the first time - as juniors in high school, one day we went to school and things were normal, and the next day, it was like we aged ten years. Even our teachers, the know-all authority figure, cried at the front of the room as they decided that we would skip algebra or government that day and watch a movie, color, and just be together. We attended a memorial service and sported green ribbons around school - everyone seemed just a little bit older than you should at 16 - because we learned quickly that life is short and death doesn't spare you just because you're young. Members of my class (at 16) put together a memorial page for the yearbook, spoke at her service, and generally, did things that no 16 year old should have to do. My class (I think, I'm giving them credit for this) coined the term 'Together We Can" and it has been the mantra of no less than 15 student deaths or tragedies in the last ten years - most of which, now, have no connection to my high school class, but rather, has been carried on by those who have come after us who have dealt with it time and time again. It really wasn't the way things were supposed to be - but together, we can.

It will have been 8 years in May since the awful, awful day where we lost our homecoming queen to an act that most of us today still struggle to understand - an act that had months, and even years of repercussions that just aren't easy to understand or deal with. I had the opportunity to help write the memorial article for the yearbook and put together the page, which was definitely not in the description for a yearbook editor. I was good friends with Brenna and we had planned to be roommates at K-State. I watched my best guy friends serve as pallbearer's in a funeral for one of their own. It wasn't the way things were supposed to be. There's nothing that bonds 200 18 year olds more than sitting together at their high school graduation, and 9 days later putting on the same dress or tie to attend the funeral of their homecoming queen.

After Brenna died, our homecoming king, Taylor, wrote one of the kindest posts about her - it's still saved in the scrapbooks we made for Brenna's parents so they could read all the kind words. The picture he posted showed the true joy that both of them experienced during that football game - a moment in time that is meaningless for most, but is now captured in the hearts of the 274 remaining members of my class.. forever.

And today, before our ten year reunion has even been planned... I read Taylor's obituary.

After all my high school class has been through together, you'd actually think this would be easy to process. You'd think you get kinda used to it after awhile. Maybe it's not less sad, but maybe it makes more sense.

It doesn't.

It wasn't the way things were supposed to be.

26 is not supposed to be the age where you catch up with classmates at funerals, or the age that you've contributed to obituaries. It's not supposed to be the age of reconnecting with classmates on facebook as your all realize that life actually, really, won't last forever. You're not supposed to feel connected through social media, phone calls, and texts with those you haven't seen in years because you are, once again, reminded how short life is.  It is supposed to be the age of new jobs, relationships, families, and settling into the life you've been and are working for - but if there's one thing my class never did, it was 'the way it was supposed to be'.

I have become the unofficial counselor to my friends in these situations - a role that I treasure and do joyfully because I love to help people, and love on them in any way I can - it 'fills my bucket'.  I don't know if my advice is any good, but countless times I've received phone calls from friends dealing with death for the first time because the initial shock of it is tough to process - they ask a million questions or sometimes they sit there and cry and I do my best to listen and remember what I needed at that exact time. It almost always boils down to "This isn't the way things were supposed to be, and I'm just going to be with you, and it's just going to suck"

I just finished school in August, and since the middle of August, I've settled into my first job. Being in school so long probably played a part in this, but man, I love it so stinking much. I love everything about it. I really REALLY love not having homework. I'm sure part of my joy to be at work has something to do with just that - it's new. But I like to think there's something else. I promised myself after the last court date of Brenna's in 2013 that I would spend the rest of my life trying to put good back into the world, because someone had taken so much of it away from me. And it's not just someone's intentional actions - it's that random, every day, happenings of life that take those we love way too soon.

Like tonight, where I'm tossing and turning at midnight. This isn't the way things were supposed to be.

For every game of tag down the hallway, for every time I see a 'first' with a patient, and for every time a parent is pleased with their child's progress, I will not celebrate less - not because I'm new, but because I can't imagine doing anything less - because I know what it feels like to know that someone will never get to celebrate some of life's biggest moments, simply because they didn't make it there.

When I was growing up I was best friends with the two boys that lived down the street from me. We rode the bus together, beat Mario Kart together, and they taught me the correct way to throw a football. We went sledding, built forts, played kick the can. We played crack the egg on the trampoline. We've since gone our separate ways physically, but I still get phone calls and text messages from them on my birthday, we catch up for a drink when we're home, and, unfortunately, we've been each other's first (or one of the first) phone calls when life didn't go the way we thought it would. I talked to Keaton on the phone tonight and it felt like nothing had ever changed - but the topic of our conversation told me that so, so much had.

The older I get, the more I realize I probably won't ever be able to process death. No matter how expected, how relieving from a painful sickness, or how old, it's the most unnatural thing on this whole, entire earth, and it never gets any stinking easier.

[If I'm smart enough to figure out how], I linked a post from one of my classmates that was written that I think sums it up well. May we grieve together, but take what we will, and make it what we can. May you spend your time putting the good back into the world for those who no longer can.

Taylor Medlin

The Magic Kingdom

As a child, the whole world seems to be filled with magic. Growing up with mostly boys as neighbors, magic usually involved building bridges across the creek in the backyard without falling in, playing pirates in the treehouse, seeing who could jump the highest on the trampoline, and saran wrapping each other's cars on our birthdays. The magic changed from games of pretend and who could be the most brave, to the adrenaline rush of not getting caught running through the neighborhood dressed in black in the middle of the night. Magic is the feeling when you wake up knowing Santa came, or trying to figure out what the tooth fairy looks like. As you get older, magic kind of dissipates, or so I thought.

It is almost unbelievable to me that it has been 7 whole years since the day that Brenna died. Somehow 7 seems like too small and too big of a number at the same time. It feels like it has been 100 years since I last saw her, and it feel like it was only yesterday. It is hard to believe that since I last saw her, I have moved 5 times, earned 2 degrees, and made completely new sets of friends at two different universities. It is hard to believe that the high school friends who went through this with me are now working, coaching, teaching, or raising families of their own. It's almost as if a part of us will always be stuck on this very day 7 years ago - maybe that's just me. But that feels like magic. Living at home again during OT school has felt a little like magic - where I often drive by the chunk of concrete in the median by Sonic she took out with her car just days before she died, or the tennis courts where we spent so many summer nights, or the coffee shop we spent many afternoons in. Magic, time travel, or something like that.

The day that Brenna died, the wonder for the world I had around me seemed to die too. At 17 years old, so much of the world is still ahead of you, and there's something fun and mysterious about getting to tackle it yourself. That day sucked the magic and wonder out of many of my friends with it's yellow caution tape, the sound of a search helicopter, and watching my friends collapse as they got news no 17 year old should have to get. I saw it in the way that my very favorite teachers from all four years of high school knelt weeping in front of a casket four days later. The magic was gone almost in the same way that the hot May night sucked up every ounce of water from the fields, and the way that the day sucked up every ounce of energy I had for several weeks.  Life became dry, and scary, and a daily battle.

Slowly, God has built magic back into our world - one piece at a time. I used to think that once you were an adult, magic didn't exist. But I've realized over the last few months, that it does exist - but it's God's way of sprinkling blessings towards me. The things others might label as fate, as coincidence, as 'weird' ... they're that way because if He did it in any way that DIDNT seem like magic, I probably wouldn't notice Him there at all. 

I'm currently 5 weeks away from "officially" finishing my doctorate, finishing up at a clinic in Manhattan. It has been both amusing and joyful to watch God's plan unfold over the last five months. There were a LOT of tears shed about leaving Dallas in March (like, at least half the car ride home), the place I felt so, so sure I was called, but somehow it has turned into being somewhere where I wake up excited every day - and for the first time, feeling teeny, tiny glimpses of competent at the job I've always wanted. (That's a first) Just under three months since I got home, I think I would be tearful now at the thought of going back. Maybe just another example of the lesson God started teaching me 7 years ago on this very day - that His plan is always bigger than mine.

I have begun to discover over last few months and years that the magic I held about the world around me is coming back. I'm sure it never left, but I think it took me awhile to find it again. Sometimes it comes during just the right song at church on Sunday, a phone call with a long distance friend, or the way Emma snuggles into me when she's tired or we haven't seen each other in awhile.

It's the type of magic I felt on the very last day of my first rotation when the child I had worked with 5 days a week for 12 weeks made eye contact with me for the first time. The kind of magic I felt at concerts I have been to since her death, where I feel more in touch with God and at peace with the situation than I ever thought possible.  It was the kind of magic I felt standing in a school gym in Hong Kong, listening to Christian radio in Cantonese, realizing God had literally crossed oceans to heal pain I never thought would be healed. It's the feeling I got in Nicaragua as I played games with children who didn't have electricity, running water, or for many, even a roof on their homes, and I realized that none of that even mattered. It came back as I sat on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana almost every night for 12 weeks - sometimes it felt big in the form of a 25 mile lake, and sometimes it felt small in the tiny crabs I would watch come in and out with the waves. I felt the magic in December when I went to Tampa to visit Leah, and we took a spontaneous trip to Disneyworld. We met up with a friend of mine from high school, and Taylor and I stood in the middle of the Magic Kingdom fireworks show as the songs from the Lion King played, and I realized my face was wet with tears, not sweat, remembering my senior prom and watching Brenna serenade all of our friends with songs from her favorite movie.

The magic made it's appearance the first time I saw the movie Tangled, and I cried and cried at the scene with the lanterns. It showed up when we started a whiffle ball group at my current rotation and I am reminded every single time I go to group of the one that sits on my shelf and how much has changed since I got that whiffle ball at her funeral, and how I used to not be able to be near them without crying. It came back at graduation last weekend as I was seconds away from crossing the stage and one of the nursing students turned around and I realized her hat said "the best is yet to come". The magic came when we hosted two students from Hong Kong two summers ago and I got to watch them see their first lightning bugs, have their first water balloon fight, and catch their first fish. It came three weeks ago as my family said goodbye to my great grandma, the glue to our family for 96 years, and we stood in the sunshine singing Amazing Grace as we said goodbye.

Yesterday at work, my supervisor brought her daughter to work since she got done with school for the year at noon. I was eating my Chinese food and halfheartedly typing my notes while I listened to Ayla ask about why the slime she was playing with smelled the way it did, why mommy had a meeting right now, and what kinds of games could we play with my next patient. Could we do an obstacle course? What kinds of things were we going to work on? Have you smelled this slime? We eventually went down to the gym so she could swing, and I leaned against the wall to keep typing notes while listening to her chatter. There is something incredibly relaxing about listening to the way a child processes the world, and you don't even have to talk back. I really don't know how God made everything, or where He came from, or what the world looked like before God made it, but she sure made me think that I should start figuring it out. She was spinning on the swing hanging upside down (with me wondering every so often if she was going to puke), her blonde pony tail hanging off the swing, every once in awhile taking a break to look at me and see if I could answer her 'simple' questions. Out of nowhere, she stopped swinging and said "Do you believe in God?" and there was an element of magic in the way she asked the question that I have only begun to feel again very, very recently. I never could have imagined that an 8 year old could have brought that back.

My last memory before Brenna died was driving home from my last graduation party around 2 a.m. the night of my graduation. The sign at the church near my house simply read "Congrats to the Grads" with no punctuation and two crooked letters. And in reading it's simplicity, I realized that at that very moment, I felt completely content with life, with no idea the drastic turn things would take just four days later. But 7 years later, watching a little blonde girl on a swing process the world around her, I feel like I'm back - I found the magic again.