The Person Getting on the Plane

Life is shifting in so many ways.

Some I understand.

Some I don’t.

Some are predictable. Some aren’t.

Some make sense, and some make absolutely none.

Body.

Environment.

Age.

Role.

Ability.

Focus.

Emotion.

Understanding.

Questions.

Answers.

It all changes.

And right now it feels way too fast and all too slow at the same time.

What it means to be secure is changing.

What it means to be self-sufficient.

What it means to be able-bodied.

What it means to be disabled.

What my call means.

What my hope looks like.

What I can expect from my body.

What I have to learn to do differently.

Somewhere along the way, the definitions I have lived by stopped fitting the life I’m actually living.

I just didn’t realize how much until I was on my way to Wartburg.

Walking through the Denver airport toward my gate, I knew the trek was going to be more work than it had been just six months ago.

I knew that.

What I didn’t understand was how much had already changed.

I haven’t been without Ken as my balance in some time now.

His presence next to me has quietly become part of how I move through the world.

His balance.

His strength.

His arm.

His willingness.

His love.

In the past six months, I don’t venture many steps without him.

I don’t carry things while I walk.

I don’t navigate spaces alone if I don’t have to.

And yet there is this strange exception.

My call.

Seminary.

Wartburg.

One of the few places I go where he cannot accompany me.

Just last February, doing that alone was the accepted norm.

I can do it.

I can walk it.

I can carry my luggage.

I can navigate the airport.

I can.

Not without effort.

But I can.

Except apparently six months is enough time for I can to become a sentence my mind still knows and my body no longer recognizes in quite the same way.

And as the energy drained from my body faster than my mind had learned to comprehend, I gave everything I had just to get to the gate.

Then I fell on the moving walkway.

And I couldn’t stand back up on my own.

I hadn’t even started the trip.

I hadn’t gotten my Pepsi for the plane.

I hadn’t reached my gate.

I hadn’t done anything yet.

And there I was.

On the ground.

Unable to get myself back up.

Shockingly aware of something I had apparently been learning for months without actually understanding:

I have come to depend on Ken’s presence, his balance, his strength, his love and his willingness far more—and far faster—than I understood.

And yes, I could have gotten assistance.

I could have ridden in the cart.

I could have asked for a wheelchair.

There were options.

But I’ve never done that before.

I’ve been fine.

You see, the building didn’t change.

The distance didn’t change.

The luggage didn’t change.

The moving walkway didn’t change.

My destination didn’t change.

My mindset hadn’t even caught up enough to change.

But my muscles did.

And in that moment, worlds collided.

What was for me.

What is for me.

What is to come for me.

All right there on a moving walkway in the Denver airport.

Ken wasn’t there.

And I couldn’t pretend I didn’t need him to be.

I couldn’t trick my mind into saying:

It’s always been like this.

You’ve fallen before.

Get up.

Because it hasn’t always been like this.

And yes, I’ve fallen before.

But I haven’t fallen and not been able to pick myself back up.

That was new.

There wasn’t anywhere for my mind to hide that fact.

My reality had changed.

Not theoretically.

Not eventually.

Not in some distant future I could prepare myself for while still pretending it was a long way off.

There and then.

Here and now.

Part of me died right there on that moving walkway.

I don’t mean my call.

I don’t mean my hope.

I don’t mean my determination or my future or the stubborn part of me that apparently intends to remain a pain in the ass indefinitely.

I mean something much more specific.

The distance between someday and now.

Until that moment, I could still imagine this change as something coming.

Something I was preparing for.

Something I could think about.

Write about.

Plan for.

Accept slowly.

Something out there.

Then I couldn’t get off the ground.

And someday disappeared.

It was here.

I did get up.

With the help of strangers who, in that moment, I realized were without a doubt good friends to someone.

They didn’t know my story.

They didn’t need to.

They saw someone who couldn’t get up and reached for me.

I did finish the walk to my gate.

I did get my six-dollar airport Pepsi.

Because apparently some things remain sacred.

Those parts were the same as before.

But when I finally sat down, it felt like I was watching someone else’s life.

Having someone else’s thoughts.

I wore my hat backward.

Pulled my hood up.

Put my sunglasses on.

Put my go-to music in my earbuds.

All the familiar pieces of me.

And I cried.

I cried because of what I couldn’t do.

What I want to do.

What I used to do.

What I still have to do.

What I now have to figure out how to do differently.

I cried because six months ago I could do that walk.

I cried because my mind still thought I could.

I cried because I missed Ken.

And I cried because underneath missing him was something harder to admit:

I needed him.

Not emotionally in the generic I love my husband and wish he were here kind of way.

Physically.

Practically.

His body has become part of how mine navigates the world.

And somehow that happened without me fully noticing it.

We adapted.

He carried something.

I took his arm.

He slowed down.

I leaned.

He steadied.

I stopped carrying things while walking.

We figured out where I could sit.

He became my balance.

None of it arrived with an announcement.

There was no day when someone handed us paperwork and said:

Congratulations. Your life works differently now.

We just loved each other and adjusted.

Again.

And again.

Until the adjustments became ordinary.

We had adapted so naturally that I didn’t realize how much my world had changed until I stepped outside the life we had adapted together.

And there I was.

Without him.

In an airport that hadn’t changed.

Trying to move through it with a body that had.

That’s a hell of a way to discover a new definition of dependence.

And maybe that’s part of what is shifting underneath everything right now.

Security.

Self-sufficiency.

Ability.

Disability.

Dependence.

Independence.

Call.

Hope.

I have spent so much of my life understanding security as I can.

I can handle myself.

I can figure it out.

I can carry it.

I can walk it.

I can get there.

I can get back up.

And now I have to figure out what security means when I can sometimes includes somebody else’s arm.

When independence may include assistance.

When living my call may require accepting help getting to the place where I can live it.

When the question isn’t whether I still go, but how I get there now.

Because I still got on the plane.

I still went to Wartburg.

My call did not disappear on that moving walkway.

But I don’t want to use the fact that I made it as evidence that everything is fine.

That’s the old trick.

See? You got there.

Yes.

I did.

And the way I got there matters.

The fall matters.

The strangers’ hands matter.

The tears matter.

The body that couldn’t stand matters.

The husband who wasn’t there and whose absence suddenly showed me just how much his presence has come to hold matters.

The six-dollar Pepsi matters too, apparently.

All of it is true.

That’s what makes this season so strange.

Life is changing too fast and too slowly.

I am understanding things before I can accept them and accepting things before I fully understand them.

I am grieving things I still have.

Preparing for things that are already happening.

Living a call that feels as certain as ever in a body that feels less predictable by the month.

I have questions with answers I don’t like.

Answers that create more questions.

Hope that doesn’t look the way it used to.

Security that may look less like standing alone and more like knowing whose hand is there when I can’t.

And a future that keeps refusing to stay politely in the future.

I don’t have a theological bow for this one yet.

I don’t think I want one.

I had a fall.

I couldn’t get up.

Strangers helped me.

I cried at the gate.

Then I got on the plane.

That’s what happened.

And somehow it was ordinary and enormous at the same time.

My life changed on a moving walkway in the Denver airport.

Not because everything changed in that instant.

It didn’t.

Most of it had already changed.

I just finally knew it.

I sat at that gate with my hat backward, hood up, sunglasses on, music in my ears, and a ridiculous airport Pepsi beside me, realizing that the person I showed up as was not the same person getting on the plane.

And then they called my flight.

So I got up.

Differently.

And went.