A few weeks ago, my life cracked open.
I can’t share the details, as they belong to someone I love deeply who is still inside the experience, and will be for a while. But I can say that my own life has been rearranged by it, and that’s what I want to write about. About how the future I once could imagine has gone hazy at the edges. How the givens are no longer given, how I don’t know what comes next. How everything feels up in the air, how everything feels suspended.
The last time I remember this kind of unmooring was when I was nine years old, over Christmas break, in Florida.
It was morning. The air held that cool, winter softness that happens only in the South. My older sister and I were raking leaves under a canopy of ancient oaks whose gray moss fell like lace. Nana’s and Granddad’s house sat beside a quiet, rural lake, its waters my favorite playground. Our little world felt safe there, gentle.
We were living with my beloved stepdad Jerry’s parents while he and my mom finished building the home where we would live. After a hard beginning with my biological father, Jerry’s calm and steadiness had settled our small family. His parents were elderly and deeply Southern, the kind of people who showed love through casseroles, Sunday mornings at their Baptist church, and a steady stream of sweet affection for us kids.
Nana spoiled us with chocolate desserts in the pie safe and thick morning cheese grits while Granddad puffed his pipe at the breakfast table. There were orange trees lining the long dirt drive, daddy longlegs on the garage walls, afternoons spent fishing off the dock and swimming in the lake, canning beans with Nana, The Price Is Right humming in the background, Little House on the Prairie in the evenings, and the kind of comfort that seeps into your bones.
It was the happiest I had ever been.
That morning, while raking leaves, I was thinking about my new Cabbage Patch Doll, the one I’d unwrapped just the day before. I remember feeling so lucky to have her, knowing how impossible they were to find that Christmas, toy stores sold out and shoppers lining up before dawn.
Before raking leaves, I’d been outside practicing my cheers, trying to perfect the moves for the elementary school tryouts. Like so many kids, I was obsessed with cheering, determined to get the choreography just right.
Jerry was nearby, leaning under the hood of his little blue MG, his hands black with oil. He loved his cars, loved tinkering with them.
After a while, he called out, “Let’s go check on our house! I bet there are dirt piles to climb!”
That was our thing. We’d drive the half hour or so, winding through the dirt roads of the neighboring rural town, to check on the progress of the three bedroom house that would soon hold our family. A tomboy at heart, I’d scramble up the dirt mounds while he walked the site, checking the interiors.
“Nah,” I said, shaking the short, uneven hair I’d recently cut into a kind of mullet, proud of its rural flair. “I think I’ll stay and keep practicing.”
He smiled, waved, and drove off.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
Somewhere along that familiar rural road, the steering wheel locked. The car veered. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. A broken neck. Gone.
When the state troopers pulled up the long dirt drive, my sister and I were still raking leaves. I remember the hum of the cruiser as it slowed to a stop. I remember two uniformed men stepping out, their faces and shoulders heavy. I remember not thinking much of it. I remember Nana opening the metal screen door, her expression curious and kind, unaware that everything was about to change.
By the time they left, everything I had only recently begun to believe in during my young life — the possibility of a safe home, a steady family, the feeling of comfort, the experience of deep joy — had dissolved into air.
The world had been remade, and I was small inside it, trying to make sense of what couldn’t be understood. Where would we live? Would we still belong to Nana and Granddad now that Jerry was gone? Would my mother survive this heartbreak? Would I? Wasn’t Christmas just yesterday?
It was the first time I understood that life could turn without warning. That it could shift, even vanish, mid-sentence. That the world was not as safe as I had once, falsely, naively, believed. That the gifts of love, steadiness, and safety could be quickly revoked.
And now, right now, forty years later, I’m finding myself once again inside that vital ache of ocean-deep uncertainty. The circumstances are different, but the feeling is the same. A life interrupted. A landslide. A horizon gone quiet. Will it emerge again? What’s ahead? I don’t know.
What remains, now as then, is resilience. Breath. Courage. Family. One day at a time. One breath at a time.
What I didn’t know then, but what I know now is that trust belongs here too. Trust that the unfolding will include grace. That family will rise up. That friends will rise up too. That all the tools I’ve gathered in the realms of soul care will begin to stir and do their work. And that the overwhelming waves of grief, rage, and bewilderment are here to crack my heart open.
My commitment to myself is to stay open, to let it all rush in—the ache, the wisdom, the holy mess of it all—without hardening my heart. It’s tricky and vulnerable, and yet I know in my bones it’s the clearest way through. Making art is helping. Writing is helping, too. I’m grateful fot that.
For those of you in similar seasons of landslides, I see you. I see these moments that ask everything of us. I see us learning, loving, growing softer in the process. We are students of it all right now. Wide-eyed. A little unwilling, maybe. A lot relunctant. But we are here. Breathing. One holy breath at a time.
Brave in sadness. Brave in learning. Ultimately, brave in love.
