talitha koum.
Eight months ago, at the beginning of the year, I looked back at 2018 and all I survived, and all that year brought me. I faced 2019 armed with the strength and hope that I learned in 2018. I felt ready for whatever 2019 had in store for me.
I had no idea what I was in for.
2019 has been hard. In April of 2019, I went through (and am still going through) the most devastating loss of my life. I lost my best friend, my soulmate, my nonbiological twin. We had been fighting for months, at each other’s throats and driving each other apart. She stopped speaking to me after one of the worst fights I have ever had with anybody on April 4th. I cannot, in words, explain what the last five months of my life without her have been like. The best analogy I can come up with is that it is as though I have lost a limb. There are two parts to the pain: the emotional and physical trauma of losing a limb, which are in and of themselves almost insurmountable, and then there is the issue of continuing my life without this limb. This limb has been a critical part of me, there with me as I learned to crawl, and walk, and climb, to take care of myself in every sense of the phrase, and now it is gone. Now I am confronted with the possibility of spending forever without this limb, and I don’t even know where to begin. I must learn to live without it, and my unfortunately inflexible, adult mind does not want to change its ways to live without this limb.
But I do.
I don’t want to have to, but the alternative to adaptation is demise, and that, most certainly, is not desirable. I want to live. I want to thrive. I am so grateful for every moment my lungs breathe life into the blood my heart pumps, unendingly, into my arms and legs and brain and allows me to continue to live. After all that I have put my body through, and all the times I have threatened it, it has not abandoned me. My heart pumps, my lungs breathe. I can do that without an arm, or a leg, or a girl I thought was my soulmate.
I am not an incredibly religious person; that is to say, I don’t go to church, or pray every night, but I believe deeply in God, an afterlife, and especially, a soul. I believe that there is a part within each of us that cannot be measured or seen, but which is our inherent self. I believe that the physical body is but a shell for this essential piece, without which we are, in fact, meat computers and nothing more. But we aren’t meat computers, we are so much more complicated than that, full of emotion and dream and tears and love and fear, that cannot be scanned or scoped or graphed. And that is God.
I don’t often quote the Bible, but I did study it a fair bit as a child, on my own in my illustrated children’s Bibles, in church, and through the workbooks in my seven or eight years of religious education classes, so I’m familiar with the miracles of Jesus. There are seven big ones, but he performed lots of miracles beyond water to wine, walking on water, and raising Lazarus from the dead. He raised a bunch of people from the dead, actually, including the young daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus. The little girl was dying when Jairus came to Jesus for help, but Jesus did not get to her in time. She died, but when Jesus saw her he said “Talitha koum!” and she rose from the dead.
“Talitha koum” means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” in Aramaic. Somehow, in all that Catholicism I grew up with, I never learned the words that Jesus used to raise Jairus’s daughter from the dead. Talitha koum. There is something about the way those words sound that is beautiful and soothing in and of itself to my poor, broken, aching heart, but also--the commandment. GET UP. I struggle with major depression and crippling anxiety, both of which adhere me to my bed for hours upon hours some days. When I want nothing more than to GET UP, that simple task is entirely beyond my reach. There are days when I would love nothing more than for Jesus to stand over me and raise me from the dead with those powerful words. GET UP. And truthfully, I have spent much of my life rising from the dead. From childhood emotional abuse, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder; through middle school and high school bullying, debilitating depression, and wasting away from eating disorders; to college, and adult life, where I have fought with everything I have to love and care for myself at long last (however inconsistently and imperfectly); and the illness, death and near-death, trauma and PTSD, and other hardships that life has peppered through my days -- through all of this: I get up. I shower. I brush my teeth. I feed myself. I call my mom. I cry, I hurt, I fear. I take my medicine, and pictures of the sunset. I drink water, and go to work and school, and advocate for myself. And often, it is not easy. It is rarely easy. But it is my life, and by God, I am going to live it. I am going to get up. Talitha koum.