Summer's Almost Gone

Summer’s almost gone.

Such a comment may seem odd coming from a school teacher.  After all, hasn’t summer break been over for weeks now?  Besides that, Labor Day weekend ended our cultural summer, anyway, if not the solar one.

The phrase, though, “Summer’s Almost Gone,” is also the title and refrain of an obscure Doors song I used to listen to quite a bit.  Jim Morrison sang it as a lament, with more pathos than you might expect coming from a rock star screaming through the springtime of his own life.

Seasons—summer, autumn, winter, spring—have been on my mind lately.  I’ve been thinking particularly about the habit of using seasons as metaphor to describe specific periods of our lives.  As many of you know, our family is going through a rough season as we wait for Annaka's liver transplant.  Throughout this ordeal, we could view this season in one of three directions.

We could look down.  We could look down and focus on the negative—the sleeplessness, the hospital visits, the hours and hours on the road—and, in all honesty, at times we do just that.  There are not enough smiley cat posters in the world to fight the ugly mix of emotions that surge through you at three in the morning, when your daughter has thrown up her medicine for the fifth night in a row.

In the long run, though, such an approach seems unacceptable.  Besides the added stress, dwelling on the burden makes you a miserable person. It effectively sucks away the joy not only from your own life but from those around you.

Another, much more rational approach, then, is to look forward.  It seems reasonable to accept that your current circumstances are bad, but they are current.  They aren’t permanent.  Ice thaws, for example.  Spring arrives. Eventually.

Looking forward to the life on the other side of your struggles is a decent strategy.  With practice and concentration, such an attitude is often enough to keep a person waking up in the morning and pleasant enough for public appearance.

Something is missing, though, in that approach.  Because we are so focused on the future, on a season beyond our current circumstances, we often miss the genuine beauty in our present, regardless of how stashed away that beauty might be.

For the first few months of Annaka’s life, the looking forward strategy worked pretty well.  Once it became clear though, that the race we were running was hardly a sprint and more of a marathon, we had to reconsider our approach.

Why?

Because of her hair.

You see, Annaka is little.  Her physical growth has been so subtle as to be almost unrecognizable to the parental eye.  She also has some catching up to do developmentally.  She cannot crawl, for instance, and many of the other benchmark moments that serve as almost weekly reminders that “Hey, your kid is growing up right before your eyes” have been absent in her life.

But then you look at old pictures and you notice something.  Her hair.  She has so much more lovely dark hair than she did three months ago or even three weeks ago.

It turns out that she is growing up, after all.

She is growing up, and, besides that, didn’t her brother just start kindergarten? And what about her older sister coming home from school singing pop songs learned at recess?  The point is, life continues to move very rapidly, as it always has, and looking forward to a season beyond this present is about as unacceptable as looking down at the dirt.

With this in mind, then, we tried to start looking up. Logistically this meant that we had to train ourselves to stop dreaming about a day years down the road, post-transplant, and start focusing on the good before our eyes.

We started looking up at rainbows, for example, that met us in weird places during our two-hour treks to St. Louis. 

We started to silently celebrate other little things that made our current life worth living.

The free coffee, for instance, hidden in various spots around the hospital.  It’s not good, but it is caffeine.  Or the quiet dullness of life as an inpatient, when all you can do is nothing, really, a hundred miles away from dirty laundry, dirty dishes, or carpets that need cleaned.  And although I’ve mentioned this before, it’s certainly worth repeating:  this experience has ushered in a season of profound generosity from family and friends, neighbors and strangers alike.

However, perhaps what is most worth celebrating out of all of this is the intense attention Annaka has received from us.  After all, as busy school teachers with two other busy kids, her life would have been dramatically different had she been “normal.”  By spending so much time in the hospital and apart from her siblings, however, she has earned for herself an incredible amount of two-on-one attention that she otherwise would have had to split three ways.

None of this is substitute for a healthy liver, of course.  I’m not a crazy person or a Pollyanna.  However, it would also be inappropriate of me to pretend as though God hasn’t carved some true beauty out of this ugly driftwood of a situation.

Regardless, another summer truly will be gone in a few days, because, at our most basic, we humans do measure our seasons in relation to the sun.  Fall will bring with it less sunlight, which will mean cooler evenings that will too soon become long, cold nights.  Less sunlight, however, also brings with it the unbelievable hues of autumn—oranges and reds, yellows and tans, colors so lovely they can break your heart.

They’re actually pretty easy to see, up in the leaves, as long as you’re willing to look up.