LIVE WITH - Sarah James
The pain begins in my feet.
One morning, as I wake, I notice my right foot hurts too much, as though I’d dropped a dictionary on it. I call my husband, Jack, already awake and making coffee, to carry me to the couch.
My hands hurt at the joints. Swollen, too. Too much fluid pushing against delicate bones. For weeks, while typing, writing, chopping vegetables, my hands stiffen, as though frozen in one position. I take breaks to stretch them.
“Intermittent joint pain and swelling” my doctor said, “is most likely something you’ll have to live with.”
When the fluid finally drains, Jack and I take a walk. Jack has been shelled out and filled up by grief ever since we lost his mother to cancer in August. Like fog, sorrow rolled in, obscuring everything.
“I’ve been thinking about the phrase, ‘shadow of death,’” Jack says, as rocks and fallen leaves and ice crunch under our boots, “I’ll live the rest of my life in the shadow of her death.”
We walk in between imposing maple trees with wide trunks and high branches. How long had they been there? How old were they?
I look at my husband who appears weathered by loss. In his sleep, he moves more sharply, more frequently, without waking.
“It’s like being drunk,” Jack continues. He said this to me the week his mother went into kidney failure. He feels numb, split in two, in so much pain and yet, somehow, still alive. Everything feels surreal, impossible, dreamlike, terrible.
We reach a patch of grass, and I convince Jack to lay on the ground next to me. “It will be good for you,” I say.
With our spines laid out like strings of pearls on the earth, I feel relief. We look up at the gray, thick sky. The air seems to be moving upward, as though it could suck both of us up into the clouds, into nothingness. Jack keeps his eyes closed.
He turns to me, then, and says, “I feel a little better.” He feels a little better for now, and we walk home, our hands freezing, the cold almost reaching the bone, hobbling together.
Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.
