The Lights

And the Last Room

Dear Friends —

May is nearly now complete, and the mending continues. As the days stretch ever longer with additional sun— even a minute or two is a gift before twilight — so too does my recovery from what I now affectionally call “Awful April.” Where I once wobbled down a hallway, I now walk with confidence. A few weeks ago I wondered if that odd numbing sensation in my right hand would be a permanent hardship. It seems to have resolved.

It’s good and right to celebrate this forward motion of remarkable healing. It’s also good and right to hold my story with lots of careful caution. I’m nowhere near out of the woods, and yet I spend more time now talking about the lanterns that have lined my path through this woodsy part of the mountain, rather than describing the disorienting darkness that was my reality just a few weeks ago.

Of course that’s the miracle of lights. They not only illuminate our foggy paths, they help us see the route. When we reach a destination, the story we come to tell is mainly about the lights that guided us to each new turn, each pause, and the view we never thought we’d see, or even wanted to see.

A few days ago I stumbled upon these lovely lines, a short poem that sums up what I’m trying to say with all kinds of elegance:

Lit

by Andrea Cohen

Everyone can’t 
be a lamplighter.

Someone
must be the lamp,

and someone
must, in bereaved

rooms sit,
unfathoming what

it is to be lit.

Lights — whether a lantern, candle, a campfire, a lighthouse — have always played the character of clarifier from our most ancient stories. I read Andrea Cohen’s beautiful lines and immediately thought of Lucy Penvensie, the protagonist from the Narnia chronicles, standing near the lamppost at what must have been one of her most disorienting moments inside of a new world she didn’t know, nor one she chose for herself.

My own Lucy is named after this Lucy

I’ve learned about new and disorienting places over the past five years. I’ve come to call this place the Last Room, a place I bring to life in The Brave In-Between. We’re all going to live in the last room eventually, and I have no idea if mine will last years, or maybe less than that. What I do know is that it’s the most human place of all, and the lights that have illuminated this often maddening, but more often miraculous, room are too remarkable not to share.

Spoiler alert for future readers: the lights are you. We, each of us, as Andrea Cohen reminds us, can be a lamplighter or a lamp. And eventually all of us will be called to sit under the light. I wonder if on our best days we find ways to be all three.

For now, know that my room today is full of healing light, and hope. Also this: the lights of the last room are meant for all the rooms of our lives. Even if our little flashlights flicker some, we only have to be brave enough to move close to the dimly lit corners, discover who might be waiting for us there, and bring the miracle of illumination to the story waiting to be told.

xoxo