My 40th birthday was last August. It ended up feeling a bit unceremonious thanks to undergoing a major knee surgery in late July.
I awkwardly crutched my way to my birthday dinner, requiring a second chair to support my knee in a fully extended leg brace.
I wondered aloud to my friends if “learning how to walk” was part of turning 40 for most people.
Thanks to a few grueling physical therapy sessions each week, I did learn how to walk again and happily ditched the crutches and the brace.
A little over one month after that birthday, I found myself eagerly staring at a positive pregnancy test on the bathroom counter.
Picturing a future with two kids was a lot more fun than picturing my next PT appointment, so I pictured it often.
A year of hardship seemed to finally be turning around for me.
We found out in October the tiny one growing in my womb was a little girl.
A few more weeks and we were past the 12-week gauntlet when miscarriage has the highest potential. Imagining a Wyoming summer on maternity leave started to feel like a dream and a reality woven into one.
In mid-December we were blindsided by the news that our daughter had a terminal diagnosis.
Doctors gently explained that she wouldn’t survive outside of the womb and there was absolutely nothing they could do to change that. We left the doctor’s office facing a hollowness I cannot explain.
On Christmas night we made the decision to continue the pregnancy; knowing full-well that the daughter I could feel growing in my belly would not be coming home with us from the hospital.
We named her Lumi and faced a new gauntlet of sharing this twist of fate with people in our lives; starting with our four-year old son. Day-by-day the pregnancy and our family’s journey continued.
Learning to walk with the weight of grief was exponentially harder than learning how to walk after surgery.
We consistently fell to pieces and allowed those closest to us to patch us back together.
Even in the midst of heartbreak, the innocence of a child was made real with her tiny kicks to my ribs and somersaults in the nighttime hours.
I treasured those kicks and somersaults like any expecting mother.
The only word that can describe this season of our lives is surrender. Surrendering to the unknown, the fear, and the reckless love that were all somehow intertwined.
Lumi picked her own perfect birthday in late March.
We had the gift of holding her tiny fingers for a few expansive hours while her little heart beat. Until it didn’t.
As she returned to the Light, we felt the vastness of a parent’s love all wrapped into one night. It was without a doubt the most beautiful and sacred night we will ever experience on this side of heaven.
A term I have become familiar with in this season is liminal space, which is a “space between.”
A familiar example is that of a door frame or a threshold between two rooms.
It is a structure that represents the “in between” of our typical movement patterns.
You’re not quite where you were, and not yet where you are going. I think that is what turning 40 has held for me.
Injured, but unsure of surgery. Post-op, but not yet walking. Pregnant, but fearful of a miscarriage.
Certain of pregnancy, only to learn our child would not live. Holding our sweet little girl, knowing her soul was already on its way to heaven.
Nothing is more simultaneously unique and ubiquitous than seasons of grief, illness, and hardship.
On the one hand, it feels like no one has ever felt this way before.
In truth, they haven’t; pain is unique that way. But then you look around and recognize the faces of countless people who have battled, or are currently battling, unthinkable seasons of darkness.
No one gives better hugs than those who have been through the kind of pain that lingers.
Notably absent from their presence is any attempt at wise counsel or sensemaking. Which is why this essay won’t contain any advice, a deviation from my typical writing. Instead, I will share two of my own reflections from the hallows of liminal space.
In the life I lived prior to this year, I often shared the mantra “Look where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go.”
Its physical application comes from riding a 500-lb snowmobile and trying to avoid hitting a tree (hint: don’t look at the tree).
Which I continue to affirm in that context. But I would like to retract the smugness with which I told people it applied to every obstacle in life. Because I understand now that not all of life’s trees of lament can be avoided.
I also used to think that hitting these trees could only cause pain and destruction.
But I would like to amend that theory too.
Because somehow in the midst of bracing for impact there is a strange kind of hope that emerges, if you will let it.
Hope that comes from the kindness of friends, family, and strangers. Hope that comes from faith and love amid despair. And hope that proves beauty and laughter can take root in the harshest of landscapes.
My second reflection is thanks to the countless hours I have spent clinging to the side of a mountain as a rock climber. In order to climb big mountains, you have to learn a style known as traditional climbing.
It requires placing safety equipment in the rock as you ascend.
This means you have to bring enough equipment and use that gear wisely.
When you are new to traditional climbing, you often use a piece of gear early on the climb, only to wish you still had it later. Or sometimes you don’t place enough gear, fearful you won’t have the right piece when you need it most.
The more you climb these kinds of routes, the more you learn how to make a variety of pieces of gear work in each situation.
You start to worry less about not having the “right piece” and realize that most of the time whatever gear you have in the moment will be enough.
This learning curve is the truest example of a scarcity versus abundance mindset, and it parallels my experience over this past year.
In December I was fearful that I wouldn’t have what it takes, that somehow my physical strength and mental courage would run out.
But much like climbing, the things I needed most—strength, patience, and hope—all seemed within my reach when I needed them. Sometimes they came from within, but more often they came from others as a well-timed hug or card.
I’ve been thinking about this in the broader sense as I tentatively emerge from liminal space and look to another August birthday.
Even here, where the obstacles are objectively smaller, the world still seeds questions of doubt. Questions like, “Am I enough? Did I do enough? Will it ever be enough?”
There aren’t really answers to these questions. At least not with any certainty or definitiveness.
But somewhere in the stillness and darkness of the liminal spaces, whispers of acceptance have taken root within my heart and mind. That I am enough. That this life is enough.
And that even though hardship and heartbreak will strike people I love in unbearable ways, together we will have enough.
Maybe this year wasn’t about learning to walk after all.
Mandy Fabel can be reached at: mandyjfabel@gmail.com
