What happens when your friends live

When they manage to eek out time, to create stories from the wreckage rather than succumb to the wreck

This being after

When you rush in

Show up

Deploy, rapidly, the wartime analogies

Gather your troops

March into battle

Fight, fight fight

In the form of care packages of kleenaxes and cozy socks, long phone calls of listening, furious text exchanges and weekly hand-written letters, the mealtrain, maybe even a trip across the county, a weekend together to getaway, to escape, to misplace and disremember and ignore the wreck

If even for an hour, a moment, a breath

Taking turns on the merry-go-round of supporting in, doing the shift work of living in our mutuality

Until the energy dampens, fatigue sets in, even for a moment

There’s the stepping back and watching

And, sometimes, stepping back further

Taking a break, letting your own life’s foibles and dips fill in the space

For who can sustain this marathon?

Who has the endurance?

But the patient

The person

The one without a choice

It doesn’t feel fair to say that caregiving, being a lifeline, being a friend, is exhausting

But it is

And now, it is easy to forget

Because there are so many of them

So many friends who have this and that, that and this

One too many crises

And besides, we all breathe differently

We are all half-destroyed instruments anyway

Finding the bits and pieces left from our brokenness

Each one of us carrying our brokenness and that of the world within us

Reaching out through the blue, green and black air

With hands that endeavor to suture and stitch ourselves back into a mind and body

As we wait, hope, pray, dance, do

Until, then, the breakthrough happens

A shimmer, a glimpse of hope

If it’s a promising new treatment, durable weight gain, stable housing, a restraining order, whatever the “it” is when the metaphorical city on the hill arrives

And gives more time

More living

More life

Then what?

What is in the long haul of showing up?

What happens when your friends live?