When the Closure You Wanted Wasn't the Closure You Got

(the understory of grief, my mystery leg ailment, and what it means to heal)

Last May, after eight weeks of extensive air travel (IN > Portugal > IN > CA > IN > WA > IN > TN > IN) I was at work in my sloppy ponytail, ball cap, and tennis shoes. My boss sent me across the hall to the thawing refrigerator to retrieve a banana box filled with…something. It might have been cartons of on-the-brink strawberries that would need washed and sorted. It might have been bags of lettuce that would need washed and sorted. All I know is that I opened the door, pulled the box out, and my left foot was instantly in searing pain.

With a giant box of produce in front of me, I couldn’t see that the refrigerator shelf slid out along with the box, landing on my foot. Ten feet away, co-workers bustled around, completely unaware. I briefly processed what had just happened, propped the defunct shelf up against the side of fridge, and got back to work.

Two weeks later, during a break in the action at Calvin’s nacho-themed graduation party, my sister (a nurse) and my mom (a retired nurse) asked about my foot. “Why is it so swollen?” I thought about the injury and considered the flights. No, it doesn’t hurt at all. No, it definitely isn’t broken. Do we more cheese sauce? Can you bring more watermelon out?

I dismissed whatever was happening to my foot for the entire month of June - I’m not vain, after all - and self-prescribed a religious application of the old adage: no one is thinking about us, or the circumference of our ankles, as much as we fear. If I don’t call attention to it, I reasoned, no one would notice.

~

On July 5th, the floorboards of our faith began to shake, the first pages of devastating chapter. For the rest of the summer, I navigated a tilting landscape with one foot barely able to squeeze into its sandal.

I chalked my sister’s casual reference to elephantitis up to dormant sibling rivalry. But when my hypo-dramatic mom grew concerned about a foot issue that had bloomed into an entire lower-leg issue, I sought professional help and began having nightmares about death.

Church continued to unravel. The vascular surgeon threw up his hands. Was it the flights? The injury? Was it me? No one could agree. The podiatrist slathered me into a month’s long series of progressively tighter “soft casts” and a walking boot. Then there was an unfortunate trip to the ER, 13 failed IV attempts, bloodwork, X-rays, multiple ultrasounds, and two CT scans.

All the while, I thought about it constantly and talked about it rarely. I went to work and began an intense campaign for the District 3 seat on Goshen’s city council¹. I wore earrings and Cherry Blossom lipstick, doing my best to draw everyone’s eye upward, grateful for my height.

• At last, a diagnosis. May-Thurner Syndrome, “usually found in women who have had multiple pregnancies." (insert endless cascade of side-eye here)

• The scrappy podiatrist loosed me from my final cast and passed me off to a lymphedema clinic, a gathering place for the elderly and the critically ill.

• Our pastors and church leaders doubled their efforts, stone-walling requests to sit down and talk, referencing our lack of integrity without citing any evidence.

Over at the clinic, Carol spoke to me in hushed tones while massaging my sick leg, bless its heart. She taught me stretches, and put me through a two-day certification on a specific leg-wrapping process, which I now do every single night before bed.

elevating my foot after work, on what appears to have been a “bad foot” day

I mothered one son through his first year of college, another son through his first year of high school, my daughter through her first year at a new school, my husband through the most painful year of his adult life. I dealt with an ant infestation and made dinner most nights. In the blur of it all, after church leadership removed us from leadership “because you don’t trust us,”² I sent up a flare in the form of a text message,

“Hey Lore. We are going through some hellish stuff at our beloved church and I know you’ve gone through church stuff, though I don’t know or recall specifics. Nevertheless, I’m feeling depleted and just wanted to toss out a plea for prayers or *something* to someone who might sort of understand. I hope this doesn’t seem too weird.” I closed the text with a sobbing emoji and a bubblegum pink heart.

Lore called me within the hour. She listened. She helped. And she said, “Not to be weird, but I finally wrote about this. The book isn’t out yet, but I think you might find it helpful when it is.”

~

I cussed and cried through winter, searching gray skies for my truest self. I mainlined Taylor Swift lyrics, pondering them up in my heart. I stopped pairing my socks - only my right foot was allowed to wear cute socks. I also stopped going to church.

Constantly, obsessively, I thought about my foot. Good days were clocked in direct proportion to the visibility of my ankle bones.

I took a selfie after being “released” from every specialist. Micro-celebrations.

Winter steeled its gaze, but Spring arrived without our help.

When it was time to visit my shiny, new interventional radiologist, my teeth chattered with anxiety. Last time, he had casually mentioned surgery, which scared me to death. But I knew my only option was to trust, and I’ve learned God usually shows up looking eerily like a person.

“You want to know what I plan to do with you? Nothing,” he said with a smile. Just like that, the crazy train had run out of tracks. I was free.

Cal came home and picked up his guitar.

The peonies bloomed.

Lore’s book arrived and I read it cover-to-cover in one week.

As a writer and a voracious reader, I am constantly sifting through the pain and beauty of life alongside written companions. When the right book falls in my life at the right time (it happens often)³ I want to pass it out like baby aspirin⁴ before a long flight, preventative care from a mother’s heart.

The Understory was a virtual retreat into the forest of my grief and healing. I loved it back in underlines and dog-ears.

“I cannot just sit with my grief and ask it to teach me something. I must be willing for it to make me into something new, to reform and reorder me at the cellular level, to change what is perishable into something imperishable. I must be willing to act my grief, not just feel it. I needed a funeral, even if I held it alone.”

The Understory by Lore Ferguson Wilbert

My deductible is paid and I’ve learned more about my iliac vein than I ever cared to know, but I still don’t have a fool-proof treatment plan for ordinary heartbreak (or vanity, for that matter.) I only know it’s universal. And survivable.

If you’re limping into this summer, The Understory is your invitation into the shaded shelter of healing.

In the weeks that followed my last doctor’s appointment, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that while surgery is not in my immediate future, I am also not “back to normal.” It was the flights, the accident, me, a tangled trifecta. There is no fix. I remain a moderately vain woman staring into a compression-socked summer, trying to decide whether or not to paint my toenails.

All I wanted was closure. I hoped “healing” meant a left leg that miraculously matched its buddy and a church that said, “we’re sorry, let’s fix this.” Instead, healing is the acceptance of what simply is. I don’t exist as I did one year ago, and neither does my body or my heart. This is a new version of my true self, reordered, as Lore writes, “at the cellular level”.

Last night I hollered in to my family, “You can see tendons in my foot! Maybe even a vein!” It was the best foot day I’d had in almost a year. Sure, we can call this a miracle, but only if we’re comfortable seeing God in two layers of prescription-grade Lycra and a two mile walk at sunset.

Later, when my leg was tucked in for the night and my soul was still, I found myself wondering if maybe - just maybe - it also had something to do with the email I’d sent earlier in the day.

The last paragraph reads,

Though we are not currently sharing space with you, you are still our neighbors. We will still bump into you around town. I do not want to hold space in my heart for hatred. As I pass the church many times each day, I sometimes wince, I sometimes look away, I sometimes cry, I sometimes even smile. My sincere prayer is that it becomes a sanctuary in our neighborhood for truth, beauty, healing, and a theology that does not fear the light. 

With peace,

Shannan

My peace. My truest self.

My funeral for one.

“God’s work was to make us in his image, and our work is to keep his shape while wandering around the mornings and evenings of our lives. It is to be gloriously who we are, all the way through, all the way down, and to be gloriously where we are, all the way here, cast in the likeness of the Creator of the universe.”

The Understory

And so…

May Summer ascend.

May it be our teacher and our friend.

May we have the courage to receive its wild abundance as we practice being gloriously who and where we are.

All the way down.

1. If you’re new here, I lost. :)

2. Red flags galore!

3. A reader recently complained that another very personal post included links to a different book that helped me through this terrible time. Hopefully you’ve been here long enough to know I am *always* sharing books I love. They are one of life’s greatest gifts! When I do, I always use my Bookshop affiliate link. Very rarely (like now!) I am also compensated by the publisher to help spread the word. (My publisher also pays other authors to help share my books when they release.) My opinions are my own, shared with a glad and open heart. I am grateful for the opportunity to be compensated for my work in a way that feels aligned with my truest self.

4. Would you believe I am allergic to NSAIDS? (sigh)