In Relation to…

At 6 a.m. on our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, my husband awoke with severe abdominal pain. The pain didn’t let up all day, and at 11 p.m. I motored him to the emergency room where my daughter and I tried to get ourselves out of the way of the medical personnel as they strapped on blood pressure cuffs, slapped on EKG monitors, and slipped in IV needles. Then it was up to the ward for the night, into a room for a day, surgery the next, and a couple more days of hospital recouping. David occupied the unwieldy, technological marvel of a bed next to my neat little Murphy, but he wasn’t there. David was wandering somewhere in a land of pain and pain killers and he was out there alone. In that season, I needed my daughters and they me. We wondered together at the strangeness of it all; we held each other’s hands—literally and figuratively. We smarted at the bad news and hooted at the good. The experience altered our relations with one another and our relations with our singular souls. Relationships. Their tenuousness and unpredictability invite me into risk, into change, into growth.

I imagine holding my relationships in a cupped, open hand: cupped to feel their preciousness and their intimacy against my skin, open to allow them to breathe, to alter, and, if necessary, to drift away—then to return, if they wish, of their own volition. I find the practice more than a little scary . . . but it feels like love.

Share your thoughts.