Baby Steps

As we take steps each day away from the thin space that was my 12 days of isolation in ICU, I process little pieces each day. I love how God created our brains to get through trauma: they only start to deal with it when we are ready, and only bit by bit.

The reality of it all lingers around the edges of my consciousness. I still talk about it as if I were a news reporter sharing facts about someone else.

The doctors don’t tell you that they don’t expect you to make it until after the fact, on the other side of near-death experience. My brain didn’t truly process the reality of death as I was teetering over the edge, but it is starting to sink in a couple weeks later.

The worst of it is imagining what my family must have felt: my husband, who never worried, admitted that he was scared. My 6-year-old daughter cried bitterly in my arms over some dead grass until she recognized that she was crying over almost losing her momma. And my five-year-old son cuddles in so much closer, as if her were trying to merge with me.

And we live in this space of deep exhale, of thanksgiving, of glancing back over our shoulders hesitantly looking at “what might have been,” and quickly redirecting our gaze to this present moment; because we know, now more than ever, that each moment holds eternity.

So, we gaze into eternity in the here and now, hearts bursting with the awareness of the thin space we occupy, thankful for our unshaken foundation and that even death holds no power over God’s love that spans the breadth and depth and height and width of eternity.

Also, I’m pretty sure I have enough near-death experiences to last 18 lifetimes, just sayin.