Missing Words
I’m used to long, early-morning brisk walks. I kept up that routine for my own good through David’s illness until just a couple of weeks before that fateful day. Now, for the most part, my body moves in slow motion. Fast, productive and efficient are typically my thing. Slow and silent are my thing for now.
My entire body is slow and silent. In fact, for the first three months after David died, my body felt limp. My limbs felt rubbery. I’d get out of bed, but normal things like my body and my words weren’t working right.
Author Richard Foster said, “The only one safe to speak is the one who is free to be silent.” Well, that’s good. As a speaker, deliberate silence is an important part of my life, but this is not only the deliberate solitude and silence of spiritual formation. No, this is an all-encompassing, drop the curtain, go-to-black silence. I often have little energy to talk with people, including my husband, Cam. At the end of the day I often don’t want to talk.
In the daytime, I’m mostly silent, too, and think: What could I say? What words serve to express my languishing self? Missing words are part of grief.
And yet, there are times when I’m alone, words just emerge, sometimes erupt from me:
Da-veed!
How could you, Lord?
I want him back.
But mostly...words are just missing. And not only words, my whole being is missing. Silent.
Something’s missing.
I feel the silence. God’s and my own. I’m speechless.
Are you speechless, too, Lord? Is there something so utterly holy in this silence?
I’m real because God is so real. ~ Nancy