Stand by Me

The Last Two Years

There are songs that will always belong to this chapter of my life.

Not to a year, not to a season in the abstract — to specific people, specific moments I will carry quietly for the rest of my life. I hear the opening notes of Stand By Me and I am back there instantly. It was less a song to me then and more a prayer. A hope that the people who loved me could see past what the illness had made of me, and find me still in there somewhere. Find my heart, which I had lost track of myself.

I won't share the details of what the past two years held. Some things belong only to the people who lived them, and I hold what was carried alongside me during that time with too much tenderness and too much respect to lay it bare. But I want to talk about grace. Because the past two years taught me more about grace than anything else in my life, and I think it's the most important thing I know.

I looked in the mirror during that season and didn't recognize myself. I don't mean that poetically. I mean that the person looking back had been so shaped by pain and illness and fear that I couldn't find my own heart in her eyes anymore. And the emotions of that time were not steady — they moved like weather, without warning, without logic, and the people standing closest to me felt every shift. I know some of those shifts were hard to absorb. I know that loving me during that season asked something enormous of the people who did it.

Nobody gives you a handbook for suffering. But I've come to understand there is also no handbook for the people who love someone through it. There is no script for what to say when the person you love can't find herself in the mirror. No instructions for how to hold someone whose pain you didn't cause and cannot fix. You say the imperfect thing. You show up in the only way available to you in that moment, which is sometimes clumsy, sometimes quiet, sometimes not what's needed — and you try anyway. You try with everything you have.

To give grace to someone who loved you through your suffering is to see that trying for what it is.

It is to say: I know you didn't have a map. I know there were no right words. I know you stayed when staying was hard, and that you loved me in the broken imperfect human way that real love always moves — not the way it looks in the movies but the way it actually feels, which is tender and exhausting and faithful all at once. I care for you more than your mistakes. More than the moments that fell short. More than any of it.

That is grace. To hold someone's effort more gently than their imperfection. To say I see your heart, and I know you were doing everything you could.

And then there is the grace you have to learn to give yourself, which is harder and which I am still learning. To stop demanding that your illness and suffering look a certain way. To stop measuring your love by whether it was ever quite enough, because love that shows up in the dark and tries is always enough, even when it breaks a little under the weight of everything it's trying to carry. We are human and we are frail. We love brokenly. That is not a flaw in us — we are creatures made for a love we can only imperfectly mirror, and the trying is not nothing. The trying is everything.

The simplest thing we learn as children is to treat others the way we want to be treated. We learn it so young we forget it is actually profound. But I think about it differently now. Treat the person who is suffering the way you would want to be treated if you were suffering. Treat the one who loves you through it the way you would want to be treated if you were trying, imperfectly, faithfully, without a map, to love someone through their hardest year. That is it. That is the whole rule. Grace is just the golden rule with its whole heart open.

I spent so long wanting to get back to who I was before. Before the illness, before the hardest year, before I lost track of my own heart in the mirror. I thought healing meant return — that if I tried hard enough, loved well enough, held on long enough, I would find my way back to the version of me that existed before all of it. I wanted that so much. I grieved her.

But I am not going back. And I don't want to anymore.

The woman I am now — I don't think she existed before all of this. She was made in it, slowly, the way things are made that are meant to last. She is gentler than I was and steadier, and she knows what love truly is. Hard things still happen. They will always happen. But underneath all of it now there is something that was not there before — a peace that does not move. Not the absence of difficulty but the presence of something steady beneath it, an anchor that holds regardless of what the surface looks like. Unwavering. Unchanging.

I feel at home in myself in a way I never have before. Safe in my own heart. And the people I love are able to rest in me now in a way they couldn't before — there is more room, more light, more stillness. The house of my heart still has the same bones, the same familiar paintings on the walls, the same furniture worn soft with time. But something changed in the making of this last year. The windows let in more light now. There is a fire burning that wasn't there before, quiet and steady and warm, and there is space — real space — to hold the people I love more faithfully, more fully, than I ever could before.

That is the greatest gift I have ever been given. A dream of a gift, really — the kind you didn't know to ask for until it arrived. Because all I have ever wanted, in the deepest and most honest part of myself, is to be a wife and a mother, to build a marriage and a family and a home. And for so long I wondered if the woman capable of that — truly capable, rooted and steady and full of light — was still in there somewhere. She is. She is here. The peace I always prayed for is no longer something I am reaching toward. It is something I am living in. Finally, really, truly living in. And I will carry it into every room I ever build a life inside of.

I also want to say something I have thought about for a long time. When you are suffering and you love the people around you, you reach for them. That is natural and human and right. But I reached in ways that asked more than any one person is meant to carry. I needed a doctor and a family member and a friend and a therapist and a home all at once, and I looked for all of those things in the people closest to me, because I was drowning and I did not have my own map for how to suffer this way. No amount of love, however real, was ever meant to carry all of that alone.

But I am not that person anymore. I have learned, slowly and not without difficulty, to let the right people carry the right things. To bring my suffering to God first, and then to the people He placed in my life for exactly that purpose. To not collapse the whole of my need onto the people I love most. Only God can carry what I was asking people to carry, and learning that has been one of the great freedoms of my life. I know it now in a way that is settled and quiet and true, and I carry it forward into everything.

I believe God's grace did that. I believe that somehow, through the suffering and the confusion and the long season of not recognizing myself, He was making me more fully the woman He always intended me to be. Not in spite of the hard year. Through it. That is not a comfortable theology but I think it is a true one, and I hold it with everything I have.

And I am more myself than I have ever been. The people around me can see her now — there she is, there’s Rory — the one who was always underneath everything, joyful and steady and childlike and silly, unburdened and free. To have the people who loved me through the suffering get to see her too — that is not something I take lightly. That is everything.

We are frail and we are human and we love the best we can — brokenly, hopefully, with our whole imperfect hearts. That is the story of every person who has ever loved another person through something hard. There is no tidy ending to that story, no moment where it resolves cleanly into something easy to hold. But there is grace. There is always grace — available, inexhaustible, waiting to be given and received and given again. And I think that is what carries us. Not our own strength, which runs out, not the perfect words, which never come, but the simple and radical willingness to see another person's heart and say: I know you. I know you were trying to love me the best you could. And I hope the people we love know the same is true of us. That whatever fell short, whatever the hard year cost, we were trying too. With everything we had. In the only way we knew how.

That is enough. It has always been enough.

Stand by me.

It was a prayer then, and a prayer still.