Girl, Get Up

Strip (verb) past tense: stripped 1. To remove all coverings 2. To leave bare I want to talk about being stripped because I think it is a very central moment in which everything else will later expand outwards from. Being stripped can mean anything, but it often accompanies some type of grief. Maybe a death or a lost dream, or a childhood that is torn in a way that never feels justifiable. It is this kind of useless feeling. Useless because there’s no where to put it down, no where to shelve it. You are stripped in a way that feels raw and bereft. You are stolen from, like money in a cash register at some seedy corner store: no one’s taking money out of you anymore, because you’re empty. But that’s beside the point because you’d have nothing to give anyway. Stripped.

My stripping happened when I was fifteen. The age when I still had all the love and hope and tenacity of moving forward. But then one morning the phone rang, and it would change everything. It was my mom on the other end, except I wasn’t greeted with her soft warmth. This time her voice was heavy, and a sudden knowing ripped through me, akin to a knife sliding through butter. But I wanted to be wrong, so I said, very bluntly, “He’s dying, isn’t he?” I said it because I thought she would scold me for being negative. I wanted to be scolded. I wanted to be wrong.

But what happened next was worse. My mom said, “Yes.”

My dad’s death wasn’t like a car accident. It wasn’t sudden. It was very slow. Fevers and hospital rooms and tubes that connected to his heart, hair loss and mouth sores from chemo, and the smell of antiseptic. I had known this was coming, but I still wasn’t ready.

I sat down in the same chair my dad used to sit in. The same chair where he used to tell me about the love of Jesus. The chair I now sat in when my mom told me that my dad was going to die. His Bible still on the footstool, crinkled and worn at the corners. I stared at it bitterly and thought, “Is this love?” And shortly after that, “You robbed me.”

The rest of that morning passed in somber dread that felt both too long and too short. A beautiful hospice room surrounded by people who witnessed the moment I was stripped and who would be stripped, too. We drove home and it snowed, big fluffy flakes that settled around my heart like ice. I was completely stripped. The rose-colored glasses came off, the mirrors of hope and belief now in shatters at my feet. Expectations that were unmet. Prayers that went unanswered, limp in my folded hands.

We don’t talk about being stripped. We gloss over it. We make it sound pretty (because the truth of it is often too hard to face.) We shrug it off. We try to hide it, or worse, we see someone else who has been stripped and bleached of their own vibrant colours, and we shy away because we don’t recognize this person anymore. We’re afraid of the half-ness of them. Our hands are empty; what could we bring?

Being stripped makes me desperate. It makes me not want to let anything go. It makes me not want to let anything in. It makes me crave control and create walls of comparison so high I could never climb over them. It makes me hide from the rest of life. This tortoise-shell life of pulling inwards, of never allowing myself to go forward in fear of being stripped again.

But today I remember that I’m growing still, even though I may not be growing the way I’d always hoped to. I remind myself I am a garden and not a graveyard, and there’s still life in me.

I want to talk about getting up again. Even though it’s been so long and I’m tired, and I’m afraid, and everyone has moved on, and I am still so far from the finish line. I want to talk about the skin that grows back. I want to talk about my love that spans wide, how I’ve never really been good at hiding it. I want to talk about God and how He was never the robber, but the one that always filled me to the brim, until I was spilling over. I want to get up again. I want to plant gardens and believe in the future.

I want to get up again.