Flat, and Not Sad Exactly

The illness took nine months and then it went, and everybody was very pleased, including her.

She was pleased. She wants that understood, because what came next is difficult to explain to people who watched her go through it and have every reason to expect gratitude, which she has, in the abstract, and which does not seem to be located anywhere.

What is left is flat.

Not sad. She has said that to two people now and both of them heard sad, and she has stopped saying it. Sad would be something. Sad has a shape and a direction and you can talk about it. This has no shape. It is a general reduction in the volume of everything, so that a good day and an ordinary day arrive at about the same level, and so does a Tuesday, and so did her nephew's wedding.

She is fifty two.

The tests are all clear. Her doctor said the word recovered in June and meant it kindly and was correct.

And here is the part that she has not managed to say to anybody, because it sounds ungrateful and because there is no vocabulary for it that does not sound like a complaint about being well.

She has no grief to point at. Nothing was taken. And there is nothing in her either, and those two facts together produce a situation in which she cannot even name what is wrong, let alone ask anybody to help with it.

The sentence, unsaid: I have nothing to mourn and nothing in me, and I cannot say that to a single person.

You may know that flatness. Nothing to point at, and the volume down on everything.

The valley becomes a well by being walked through

There is a line in one of the pilgrim psalms that describes a place with a strange name, and the name is doing the work.

Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools.Psalm 84:6

Baca means weeping, or it means the balsam trees that grow where it is dry, and the scholars have argued about it for centuries. Either way it is a low dry place on the road up, and everybody walking that road went through it because there was no way around.

And look at what happens. They make it a well. Not by digging. By passing through. The going through is the thing that turns a dry valley into a place with water in it.

You are turning a dry place into a well by walking in it, and Psalm 84:6 has the valley become a well through the passing rather than through anything the traveler produces, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line from a pilgrim song and lands it on a woman sitting in a sun room with the volume down on everything.

Nobody stops in Baca

Consider what kind of place it is in the geography of that psalm, because it matters more than the etymology.

It is on the way. The whole psalm is about people going up to appear before God, and Baca is a stage of the journey, named specifically, in the middle of a song about arriving somewhere good.

Which means the psalm has already decided that a dry stretch is part of the route rather than a departure from it. Nobody in that song is asked to explain why they are in Baca. Being there is what happens to people who are going.

You are on the road and not off it, because the written word puts the dry valley inside the journey rather than beside it, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a piece of ancient geography into something she can hold on a flat Tuesday.

And notice the second clause, which arrives without warning. The rain also filleth the pools. Something comes from outside and does what the travelers could not. The passing through makes the well; the rain fills it, and the rain is not produced by anybody walking.

You have something coming from outside that fills what the walking opened, and Psalm 84 gives the making to the travelers and the filling to the rain, and the same Spirit who has been called rain all through the prophets is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Nine months of illness followed by months of flatness with nothing to point at, carried alone because it sounds ungrateful, is a real weight and it is exactly the kind that goes unreported. Tell the doctor about the flatness specifically, using the word flat and not the word tired, and mention that a good day and an ordinary day arrive at the same level, because that description is well recognized and post illness flatness is common and frequently treatable. Ask about a counselor, and say the sentence about having nothing to mourn out loud to somebody who is trained to hear it. And tell one friend, and warn them in advance that it is not sadness so that they do not reach for the wrong comfort.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Naming it is not ingratitude. You are held exactly as much in the season you can name nothing as in the year you were fighting something, because Psalm 84:6 puts the dry valley inside the journey and never asks anybody to account for being in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only in a psalm.