Layers

My sister can’t find her face today. It’s there, somewhere beneath the swelling and the sadness. It’s an inherited symptom not new to my family. I haven’t seen my mom today but if I did, I would see hives. Lots and lots of hives.

When we worry, there is a reaction. Everyone has one. In my family, worry has always been a bit too big to contain, so it doesn’t quit at mere emotional manifestation, no. It keeps on and finds physical forms (Grandma Sylvie was epic in this regard). My parents, my sister, my impossibly faithful friends, they wait. As soon as I hear from the doctors, twice a day, once in the morning, and once in the evening, I text them with the report.

Six days ago, our puppy arrived. Finally. The puppy our girls had been dreaming, campaigning, heart-crying for years, honest to God years, for Annie, over half her life. Power points were presented.  Contracts voluntarily crafted. This puppy. This puppy was a dream. A hard earned, could he really be happening, dream.

Five days ago we had to hospitalize him. And now we hold our breaths between calls, waiting to learn how his three-pound body is holding up against Parvovirus.

This is not the situation we thought we’d be in. We expected to be up at night, awakened by puppy whimpers and new-born nostalgia. Not panicked with the prayer that we don’t get the call in the middle of the night.

We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.
If we show a little tolerance and humility.
If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment.
Because here’s the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you.
There are some days when we need a hand.
There are other days when we’re called on to lend one.
This is how we must be with one another.

Those magnificent words, that crystal clarity crafted by a man who knows more than anyone should about the indiscriminating perils of fate. I think of him, our humble president. Auggie was named in honor of President Biden’s inauguration, and after one of the best literary characters of all time, Auggie Pullman. That Auggie, born with a face full of tragedy, believed everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their life, because we all overcometh the world.

I come back to words, to truth, to smithing their meanings back to life, the relief and revival in their resuscitation. At the doorstep of the new, the arrival of 2021 and the hope it held, the calendar flip that defied all laws of time (is March over yet?), we sat steeped in the wreckage of what was one of hell of a hindsight year. So how do we turn pain into progress, activate empathy into something prescriptive, progressive, promising? I don’t have the answers. But I think about them a lot.

And then I think about Queen Amanda. Twenty-two-year-old Amanda Gorman, and I think she might actually know.

And I think about Congressman Jamie Raskin, who the day before the mob seizing as he stood on the senate floor, had to bury his brilliant, radiant son, because that unrelenting beast of depression claimed another earth angel. A philanthropist, an animal activist, an embodiment of everything needed to heal our hurting world, and the darkest of all demons, it stole him from us. His name was Tommy. Tommy Raskin, and he too was a poet. When Amanda Gorman’s words pierced my heart with their power and poignant, promising prophecy, I was simultaneously stung. What must Jamie be feeling. That family.

Because here’s the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you.
There are some days when we need a hand.
There are other days when we’re called on to lend one.
This is how we must be with one another.

It is day six that our brand-new puppy sits in intensive care. We wait for the doctors to call. Where do we find strength in these moments? When our insatiably hopeful children try and make sense of a reality that wasn’t supposed to be, and we can’t explain it to them, where?

From one another.

From the suffering souls who survived worse. We look to them. They’ll never see us, they do not need to. It is enough that they are there. With their stories and their truths and let that be our legacy – that we connect in the place we are most fraught, where empathy, while invisible, is an embrace. It holds us when little else can.

That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

At this hour on this day, I do not know how our layers will unfold. What they’ll look like undone. But I do know this. Swelling will go down. Hives will heal. The Tommy’s have taught us and the Amanda’s have autographed and as we pray our little Auggie pulls through, the Auggie Pullmans of all the world remind us… all and everything we feel, we feel nothing on our own. Nobody ever should.  Because it’s together. Together is how we overcometh the world.

– Jolie Loeb

With quotes from President Joe Biden, Future President Madame Amanda Gorman and His Majesty, Auggie Pullman.

Author Bio:

Jolie Loeb is a Luxury Lifestyle columnist based in Los Angeles.