Remembering Is Not A Weakness

The kitchen is small enough that you can reach the kettle from the doorway, which she likes, and it is eleven at night, which she does not.

Two years and four months since the thing happened that changed how her body works.

She is thirty-one. She has done everything. She has done the appointments and the exercises and the app with the breathing and the six sessions and the thing where you write it down and put it in a drawer. She is not a person who has refused to try.

Today somebody at work, who is nice, said the thing. You have to stop dwelling on it, though. At some point you have to decide.

And she agreed, because you agree, and then she came home and stood in her small kitchen at eleven at night and thought about it while the kettle did its thing.

Because the truth is that she does keep remembering. Not deliberately. It arrives. Standing in a doorway, in the middle of a good film, halfway through a sentence about something else entirely. The whole of it, the day it happened and everything since, comes up whole and sits down in the room with her.

And what has been forming in her all year, and what she cannot say to anybody, is not grief exactly. It is the fear underneath the grief. Which is: normal people stop. So the fact that I do not stop must mean something is wrong with me in some way that is separate from what is wrong with my body.

If your remembering arrives unasked, you know the person at work meant well, and you know that word dwelling has been sitting in you all evening like a small stone.

Jeremiah wrote it down and did not apologize for it

Weigh it first and weigh it fully, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the memory. It is the second charge laid on top of it. It costs you the right to have a normal response to an abnormal thing, because somewhere along the way the response itself became a symptom. It costs you the middle of good films. It costs the small daily energy of monitoring whether you are dwelling. It costs you a suspicion, formed alone at eleven at night, that there is something wrong with your character as well as your body. And it costs the honest sentence at work, which is now permanently unavailable.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because nothing on this site ranks one person's load against another's. Any word from God that needs your two years and four months made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the eleven o'clock kitchen has gone past heaviness into thinking everybody would have a simpler time without the whole business of you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one friend who will come and stand in the kitchen, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who turn up at eleven at night.

Now, Lamentations, and I want to be careful with this because most people only ever meet one paragraph of it.

Everybody knows verse twenty-three. His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, great is thy faithfulness. It is on a great many walls.

Almost nobody reads the four verses immediately before it, which is where the man who wrote it actually is.

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.Lamentations 3:19-20

My soul hath them still in remembrance.

Still. He uses the word. He is not describing a phase he has come out of, and he is not confessing a failure. He is stating, in the middle of the most quoted passage about mercy in the whole Bible, that the things are still coming up in him, whole, unasked.

You are in the company of the man who wrote great is thy faithfulness, and he wrote it four verses after admitting he still remembers. Lamentations 3:20 puts the still remembering and the new mercies in the same paragraph, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that ordering off a wall calendar and gives it back its first half.

Now feel what that does to the word dwelling. The Bible has a whole book of somebody going over it, out loud, in detail, with the wormwood and the gall named specifically. The book is in the canon. Nobody edited it down. And the man doing it is not presented as a person who has failed to move on, he is presented as somebody telling the truth, and the mercy verse only means anything because of what it is sitting next to.

You have been given a Scripture that does not treat remembering as a defect to be corrected. That is written into Lamentations 3, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient poem land in a small kitchen at eleven at night.

Now let me be honest about what this does not say, because you have had two years of good advice from people who like you.

It does not tell you the remembering will stop. It makes no prediction about your body or your mind or next year, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and anybody confident about somebody else's recovery is being confident about themselves.

It also does not tell you the woman at work is a bad person, and it does not tell you to stop the appointments or the exercises or anything else that is helping. Nothing on this page is medical advice and nothing here is going to suggest that reaching for care is a lack of faith, because that would be a lie and a cruel one.

And it does not rank you. It does not say your affliction is worse than his. It says still in remembrance, and it says it without embarrassment, in a book God kept.

You were never diagnosed by heaven for remembering. Scripture puts the words still in remembrance in the mouth of a prophet without a single correction attached, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it to a woman with a kettle.