It’s not just a stick leaning against a tree

Innocuous moments are destined to catch us out. Ponder this story that was shared with me.

Having lost her husband of over 50 years to a sharply aggressive metastasising cancer, he himself only in his early 70s, this woman we will call Gladys has been overtaken many times by a new experience in her early-elder years.

The narrative runs like this: even before the diagnosis, let’s say that was less than two months prior to his death, the couple were burning off on their rural property—an annual practice over their entire married existence.

Nothing breathtaking in that! Except for the fact that 50-odd seasons of doing the same thing runs ruts deep into the psyche of a shared experience between the two.

On this final burn-off together, Gladys vaguely recalls leaving a particular stick leaning against a particular tree (after all, according to her, “It was a really good stick!); vaguely, in the sense that it wasn’t a particularly notable action to remember.

What makes the action significant, and what makes the memory sharpen on what should have been a vague recollection but was now no longer, is the fact that she walks past that particular stick leaning against the tree and is suddenly thrown back to a time where life was ‘normal’ and, there, time stands still.

Gladys stands at that tree and has one of those moments where her recall triggers instant grief, and she is literally staggered at the solemnity in that last-time moment she unthinkingly burned off with her now deceased husband who was fighting fit at the time.

It was only 12-months ago.

In that time, she’s ridden the roller coaster of shock at the diagnosis, the choppy waves of a light-speed fight with cancer, the plunge into palliative care and death at home, the abrupt planning of a funeral between Christmas and New Year, and the learning of a ‘new normal’ since; stopped in her tracks is Gladys, frequently through reliving a harrowing darkness in these events of memory as they crop up to remind her of soulmate love that is lost. (It is quite an irredeemable word, “lost.”)

You see, it’s not just a stick leaning against a tree.

It means more than anything. The image is potent on the eye. The moment is caught on the camera of her experience and it changes the trajectory of her day. She immortalises the moment and memorialises the stick, the tree, everything that brings the moment 12-months beforehand sharply into view.

Not only is there pain in such a moment. There is something far deeper to be caught!

Imagine just how significant all our innocuous moments are, for the simple fact they’re shared, for the simple fact they hold us connected to others we care about, and to life itself, and are always significant when peered at through the lens of loss.

Then I saw this posted by a friend on social media:

“Knowing by most painful experience what deep depression of spirit means, being visited therewith at seasons by no means few or far between, I thought it might be consolatory to some of my brethren if I gave my thoughts thereon, that younger men might not fancy that some strange thing had happened to them when they became for a season possessed by melancholy; and that sadder men might know that one upon whom the sun has shone right joyously did not always walk in the light.” — Charles Spurgeon.

Yes, even the Lord Jesus experienced loss and was sorrowful to the point of tears. Depression is a normal phenomenon of the human condition, and as loss is the cause, the effect is melancholy. We are human after all. There is no shame in it. On the contrary, our depression no matter who we are shows us to be most human, capable of being floored by pain. This is a most important validation, even if we deplore the depression itself. Take heart.

There is always a sharp progression of depression in grief and grief in depression. And it can be a moment that triggers a slide down the slippery slope into the abyss. So often just a moment, a recollection that would hardly rate in times normal.

Our moments are not just sticks leaning against trees. Our moments, all of them, encompass all of what life is itself.

Photo by Jean Gerber on Unsplash