Letter 28 - last one - Giving Names

This is my last "Niger" letter. In light of our conversation tonight, Pete, it's ironic that I'm posting it. I've got to put this letter up so I can feel moved on. I have other things to write about. But despite the lateness of this letter, and despite my conflict applying what it says, I mean every word of it still. 

Peter, James, Matthew... and Josiah,                            first edition 02/25/14, last edition 10/26/14

So you’ve read about my return to Niger. And my visit to the new Dakoro with the paved road and overgrown market and rerouted swamp in which I disguise my identity even from my guards and pretend I don’t speak Hausa. And my stops in Maradi and Galmi, where I am haunted by the voices of childhood slipped away and adulthood I can’t step into. And my days in Niamey encountering the life I didn't live before and the life I can't live now. And it's over. I didn’t say goodbye, but I did say sai enjima and meant it as I love you, I leave you.

I waited until I got back to the States to write about my trip to Dakoro because if I didn’t write about it, it didn’t hurt. The letter brooded under the surface of me while I focused on spending my last days with our family. I’m glad I waited till now to write it, because now I can’t stop crying. (I took my time writing it. I withdrew from my normal social activities and wrote and rewrote this letter for weeks. Then I made decisions and left Virginia.)

Leaving hurts, which is why I fear – and avoid – saying goodbye. Goodbye ushers in grief. Grieving hurts, too. It’s a final acceptance of loss. That’s the scariest thing for me about loving – unpacking – any kind of allegiance: it creates the possibility of losing, leaving, grieving. On the air plane back to the States, I watched a movie called “Beyond Borders.” (I love the main actor, Clive Owen – he always plays reflective, abrasive, passionate, globally-minded characters that are exactly my "type" and he is ruggedly handsome... also my type. :) )  It looked interesting – an English aristocrat girl whose perspective on life changes as she falls for a human rights activist in Sudan. Something I’d like. I have mixed feelings about the message of the movie. But this one scene really stuck with me:

                Sarah: “You never say my name. Why?”

                Nick: “What’s the first thing you do when you get a cold?”

                Sarah: “Uh… chicken soup, aspirin, scotch…”

                Nick: “You never just have the cold?”

                Sarah: “I don’t know what…”

                Nick: “Taken nothing.  Just have the cold?”

               Sarah: “No.”

Nick: “No, and that’s us, right? We drown it. Kill it. Numb it, anything not to feel. You know, when I was a doctor in London, no one ever said, ‘medahani.’ They don’t thank you like they thank you here. Cause they feel everything, straight from God. There’s no drugs, no painkillers. It’s the weirdest, purest thing – suffering. And when you’ve seen that kind of courage in a little child… how could you ever want to do anything but just hold him in your arms? You remember that boy in London, JoJo?.... The point is, he was my friend. He had a name. So now I have to remember him. If everybody I lose has a name…” 

                Sarah stares. And so did I. Because Nick is exactly right. He’s right about the difference between Western and African coping with pain. I coped like a daughter of America when I left Africa. Pain is the body’s message that something needs to be done. When we override it, sometimes we do more damage. But we numb it because it’s hard to be present with suffering. Lately I think that suffering, not death, is the great antagonist of life. 

And Nick is right about naming people – naming anything. The great myths start out with names. Science classifies. Math starts with the numbers and their relationships to each other. The Biblical explanation of human social dynamics starts with Adam naming Eve. When I name you, I give you relativity to me – just like when I unpack, I move in. When I give you relativity, you become something to me and that means that I can love you or fear you or hate you or conquer you. When I love you, it means it could hurt to leave you.  And it also means I could lose you, in more ways than I know. 

You know I love Pinterest. Yesterday while catching up on it since my trip I stumbled across a quote:

“The hardest part about letting go is finally realizing that there wasn’t much to hold on to.”

I don’t actually think that is true. I think the hardest part about letting go is realizing that there wasn’t a lot left of my Dakoro, but there was a lot left of Dakoro me. She was bored, she was lonely, she was the odd girl out in town, she was conflicted, she wanted to run away and leave it all behind. And so she was disappointed – although also oddly relieved – that there wasn’t much to physically leave. 

This letter is about still being unable to say goodbye, but being able to leave. It’s about something in between holding on and leaving that outlasts both. Freeing ourselves from dependence on the shredded bits of the baby blanket. Becoming a confident driver even in third-world traffic. Coming to peace with our life-stage-transcendent need for security. Learning the personhood that can create a home without building a shell. Growing the honesty about the emptiness of our grief, so the chaos can stop echoing and maybe be reborn.  

I’m seeing that I have been selfish – I’ve tried to make emptiness my own experience or attribute it only to the people I identify most with (TCKs, etc.). But everybody – everybody – knows the brooding power called Empty. 

Empty is windswept-sand-and-tide-burial  years between a snail dying and a little homeless hermit crab discovering the abandoned shell. Empty is an unnamed stillbirth. Empty is a marriage held together by fear. Empty is a heartless righteous church where obligation is preached and pain and desire go unspoken.  Empty is cancer taking your left breast and leaving you with a battlescar you can’t own as part of you yet. It goes on and on in colors and words and pictures that I can’t imagine because the faces of Empty hide inside us and I only know my own, or the ones other people share with me. 

But the face of Empty shifts with perspective because Empty has sides. Dreadful. Hopeful.  Empty is a space becoming a process, not an entity.  We grew up hearing this and I never saw it, but it was there the whole time. In Matthew 12:43 – 45, Jesus talks about an unclean spirit being cast out. I’ve always heard this passage explained as a warning on the right and wrong ways of exorcising: when we cast out demons or encourage people to abandon sin, we must make sure that they are replacing the sin/demon with faith. Sure. But look at the surrounding text. This passage is about the state of a man, the state of a generation, and how that depends not just on making space but on filling space, and on how you fill it. I’m putting it all together below with my comments in brackets. 

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees [that-day-Judaism’s religious symbol of Empty] answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you. [Prove that your newness is something better than we have to offer.]”

But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous [rotting and cheating on the truth] generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish [in the Empty of his whole life and hope that swallowed him when he tried to abandon his ministry to the world because he saw it as a threat to his people’s survival], so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth [in the Empty of death]. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah [cast out one thing and filled the Empty with another] and behold, something greater than Jonah is here [saying “I have not come to steal from you or kill you or destroy you, I have come to fill you with life that overflows your Empty” (John 10:10)]. The queen of the South [who came to see Solomon so she could replace her take on life with his Judaism-based one] will rise up at the judgment of this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here….[And this generation has been left Empty but they will not let me bring about the Rebirth of all the death they hold on to and the loss that made them cling].”

While he was still speaking to the people outside, behold, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak with him. But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

 Israel had lost so much. They clung to the little they had left, the rites and rituals of a frozen grief, waiting for Messiah to come heal. But they couldn’t make room for Messiah’s new life because their hearts had become whitewashed tombs – the shrines of Empty. We must grieve things that are worth grieving. But we can’t let grief be the new demon. 

Heart becoming the shrine of Empty. This is what I have done. A whale swallows Jonah and becomes his cocoon to bring redemption to a nation he tried to escape saving. A tomb seals in the Light of Life for three days and three nights and it comes back shining out so brightly that it breaks seals and rolls boulders and walks through walls until it walks into me thousands of years later. I am found and found and found by persistent invasive Light for years.  And here I find myself, not haunting Nigerien playgrounds or building a new American life. You want to know where your heart is? Look where your mind goes. I am found here in my shrine of Empty with my eyes and ears shut resenting the losses and the reminders that I choose to see as graves instead of gardens.  I meet the eagerly generous Power of the collapsed shrouds and cast-off cocoons and broken “final” seals. And all I ask Him for is sympathy at the disruption of my shrine because I decide that the new gifts, perspectives, futures can’t be better than what I get from worshiping the remains of the old.

I work as a nurse and I see it everyday: it is easier to worship your suffering than to make room for healing. It’s easier to lie still in bed after your operation than to move so you can mend. It’s easier to insist that your pain is beyond medical control than to acknowledge that you have a narcotic addiction. It’s easier to leech your life-force from others’ sympathy than to confront the black hole your hurt has become. We would rather live in unhealed grief and self-pity than look our lack of wholeness and our victim mentality in the eye. I often think of Jesus’ words to the lame man by the pool of Bethesda:

                One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed [made whole]?” (John 5:6)

                Our culture has this false idea of healing. We think that scarring is sufficient. And granted, that’s really all that medicine can do. We can’t renovate our patients, although they often think we can. Your abdominal skin scabs and scars and we take out the stitches – you have healed, follow up with your surgeon in four weeks. But that’s not necessarily true. You have not healed from the shock of the drive-by shooting or the sudden intestinal blockage or the news of operable colon cancer. You are not whole, you are just healed and scarred. A holistic concept of healing is greater than scars you survive with. It’s wholeness, restoration, new life – maybe something that needed to germinate in scars, but not something that built itself around and ornamented their keloids.  

                So do I just want to be healed? Go home with scars, consume my daily numbing agents, cater to the fear that it could happen again or the belief that now I am – or Life itself is – defective but better than whatever else could show up? Or do I want to be made whole? Will I give up the self-importance of victim status, quit acting like my wounds in life have been unique from or superior to anyone else’s, let Light and Grief turn the shrine of Empty into a chrysalis? What do I have that is so sacred that I can’t let truth and life desecrate it? It is the thing I need most to be rid of. I don’t have to escape or build monuments to loss. I have to be thankful for gifts given and gifts given away and the incubation that hovers among them all. I have to welcome the moments when Empty opens up the echoes to make room for new names.

Nick was wrong. It’s not a horrible thing to lose people who have names to you. It’s a horrible thing to leave people nameless because you can’t stop losing them. Losing people you love is tragic, yes, but means you had the privilege of names and everything they stand for. It means that in the twisted wreckage of the once-glorious time-bomb creation that ticks down regardless of you, love still is germinating and it is not regardless of you. Maybe that’s the only hope we ever have – the hope that no matter the weight of unexplained pointless suffering, love will still be brave enough to give names.

Maybe someday when our younger siblings unpack their deeper boxes they too will find there isn’t much left in them. If so, maybe we can help them fill the Empty, or open it, or at least name it. Give it a relativity so they can own it, so when it germinates they can give it away to fill someone else’s Empty. Maybe by then we will have opened some more of our shrines, unpacked some of our own boxes, started recreating home, started actually loving names instead of the novelty of them. On my visit to Niger I found out I left Niger a long time ago. I didn’t leave the girl I was in Niger, who couldn’t trust and indulged in being the object rather than the subject in the story.  Your love has helped me open up Empty and start identifying lies. Someday maybe I’ll be Tabitha the protagonist, someone who can love the people in my life more than I love my sense of power over life. Regardless, I love you, knowing I will leave you often, that I will lose you and find you and lose you again sometimes, that maybe those Empties will be our places for new wholenesses to grow. 

You’re more than “dear boys.” Your names are Peter, James, Matthew – and you too, Josiah. You have been Peela, James-Man, Mavvey, Siah. You answered to Bitrus, Yakubu, Matiyu, Josayah. You go by Pete and Matt and Bud and My Brother and Seriously Dude???. And when you have new names I will learn those too. 

Har abada,

Tabitha