One Last Time

Martha Creek Campground, BC

When Violet and I went to BC Children’s Hospital last October for her one-year follow-up, Rylie was still in the hospital, and we popped into her room after our clinic appointment to visit. The two girls were both dressed in pink sweats , their matching chubby cheeks glowing as they sat beside each other on the bed. Rylie asked her to stay longer and play. We had to go meet my brother, but we’d be back soon enough, I told her. Or we’d arrange a play date back in the Okanagan when she returned.

I didn’t know it was the last time I’d see her.

Just like I didn’t know that day in May, 2021, that it was the last time I’d see my house in almost a year when I packed a backpack and jumped into the front seat of an ambulance.

I didn’t know, because we can’t see the future. We don’t know what’s happening next year, next week. Even five minutes from now. It’s only a guess.

How present, then, can we live? How do we let go of the need to know how it all turns out? Or to feel safe and secure in what is right now?

I’ve had so many moments over the past couple of years where I have felt frustration and anger and resentment at the sentiment that I should “let it go”. “It’s over, Shawna. Move on. She’s better now. It’s in the past. Don’t drag it on.”

Maybe it’s just me – just a self-defensive perspective, but I don’t think I’ve been living in the past at all. But I have had to make healthy space for reality. Now Violet has relapsed, and reality is now knocking, once again, on our door.

I shouldn’t be mad. How could I blame anyone for that kind of advice? We all need to move on, move forward. But what I recognize in that attitude is a fear of potential future scenarios that others don’t want to consider. We want to believe that when you get through a storm, you are safe. Secure. Never to return again to what was before.

None of us are safe from uncertainty. We are all in some way in permanent limbo, at the mercy of a million things we will never be able to control.

I’ve been having a lot of moments these past few days where I recognize the fragility of things – the unpredictability of life. The “firsts” and the “lasts” happening all around us, every day, defining the edges of our stories. Beginnings and endings. Coming and going, living and dying, all in flux. All in motion.

Change is incredibly hard for me. And despite the philosophical musings I have about the importance and inevitability of it, change scares the living shit out of me. I have refined my ability in life to “make the best of things” and see each moment from a million different angles in order to frame it in a way that works for me. But taking action? Making a choice, intentionally inflicting change upon myself?  Not a chance. I am the Queen of “take backs”. I am horrified by burnt bridges. I need to know there is a way out of every decision, especially backward, on the chance that I made a critical error in judgment and need to scramble back to the ledge.

But not taking chances, making decisions, letting go – that is denial of what is. Everything is moving forward, whether we go along or not. And although we’d like to think we have it all figured out, how things are supposed to go, how everything should look around the next corner, we don’t have a clue. There are no “supposed-to”s. There’s just what is.

Life has a way of handing you wisdom even if it has to shove it straight down your throat. Our journey didn’t “end” at the ring of a bell, and I knew it. Not to say I knew exactly what it would mean, but more so that there are no “ends” to things – just edges of the next story. Things keep weaving themselves through, and we have to roll with it or get rolled over. There is no scrambling back to the shore.

We are back in the stream and the rapids are powerful beasts. I can’t paddle my way through this, and that’s ok. Sometimes you need to let go of the oars, of that distant shoreline behind, and let the river take you. There is no place you are supposed to get to. But you can’t stay in one spot, that’s for damn sure.

I am leaving the shore again, and I can feel it, but this time I’m not looking back. I can’t. If I do, I’ll try to paddle backward, and that’s futile. I need to trust the current. And, more than anything, I need to accept that I may have seen that shore for the last time. I didn’t know it, but we never do. We just need to keep our eyes forward and let it go.

Every moment is something we will never return to. Not exactly, not in the same way. That moment is gone and has made way for something new. That doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. We should grieve. Life includes those things we hold onto for a little while. That’s part of it. One shore to another. One “last” leading into another “first”.