Marriage : Talitha Cumi

Part 4

It has been a few weeks since the last post to this series. I wrote an intermission piece to reset which perfectly coincided with the fifth plague that has encumbered our household this year. We are on a roll. I suspect boils or hail will come next. You may place your bets.

June 2018

On our way to Winthrop, WA for our third anniversary weekend.

We last left off with the epic thunderstorm that left me ever so humbly returning to counseling with my tail between my legs. If I’m honest, that counselor wasn’t the best fit. We talked a lot about the enneagram, which if you are not familiar is another personality assessment metric similar to Meyers-Briggs. There are nine types and things got weird when five months in we discovered I was in fact not a nine but a six (maybe a seven, to this day I can’t say what I am). The point is, personality assessments are helpful not healing and my counselor was trying to put a splint on a half severed head.

I stayed with her for a few more months because I was scared of hurting her feelings. Lucas finally put his foot down, and told me I needed to be brave and find a better fit. He was right, and even in the process of trying to find help, his autonomy began to affect our relationship. He was supporting me while giving me space to figure things out, because he respected me. As much as the goblins in my head wanted me to believe differently, something was changing. So I gently broke up with my enneagram friend and asked some folks at church if they had any recommendations. They did.

Lake Washington looking towards Bellevue. Runs along the lake were some of the best prayer times.

The hard part about meeting with a new counselor is getting them up to speed. I wish we could just submit a ten minute video of our lives up to that moment that succinctly plays every high and low, trauma, success, victory, all the bits that make you, you. It would be less subjective and triggering. I had to get Carol up to speed. This time I wasn’t in the counselor's office for my marriage, I was there for me. It took two one-hour sessions of me talking and her listening but we got it done. At the end of our second session, she asked me one question. “Do you write?” I told her, “Yes, well sort of. It depended on the season. In high school, when things were dark I wrote everyday.” She nodded, a little knowingly and then I left. I felt like she had just jedi-mind tricked me somehow.

She had indeed jedi-mind tricked me because what poured out of my hand for the next few months was a lot of processed things I thought were good and buried. Going back to the garden metaphor for a second, I had pulled the tops of my weeds for years. Changed habits and responses but never dug out the root, I never sat with the heart matter. I knew I had been angry. I knew I was angry. However as more of my story rolled off my soul and onto the pages it became clear the anger was tethered to sadness, which in turn was born from grief.

Lucas and I on Mount Eleanor, in May of 2018.

It is hard, almost crazy-making, to grieve something or someone that has not died but has so wholly transformed, nothing of its former self remains. There should be a ritual or ceremonial practice someone can go through to mark the change and set the time of death so closure exists. So what is gray and unclear can become black and white. It feels privileged to say my childhood ended abruptly, there are many who were not afforded one from the start. It feels naive to say my family died over night, “family” does evolve and change over time. It feels pious and righteous to say I want people to know the truth, but my truth is subjective and absolute truth will only one day come to fruition. 

And yet I still needed to grieve my childhood, my family and the truth because they are worthy of grieving. In a wild turn of events when I was twenty-one I came to know Christ. It was sudden and not at all a part of my college plan. It was rather inconvenient if I’m honest. But it happened and my life careened in a different direction, I became a new being. My old self died. This was something I did not mourn, but in fact rejoiced over. Here lands the hypocrisy of my heart. I wanted to cling to dead things and wondered why my life was wrapped in bitterness. I had rejected the new creations that came from the passing of those life events, and wondered why I felt stuck.


There was something I heard time and time again throughout high school and college when I struggled with depression, the suicidal thoughts, the eating disorder, the estranged relationships - “get up little girl”. It was an anthem that brought peace and courage when the next step felt unbearable. The voice was never audible but it was distinctly apart from me, from my own thoughts. It wasn’t until I began attending church at twenty-one the voice came into focus. The church was going through a series on the book of Luke. A few weeks after attending we arrived at chapter eight. 

This chapter is an account of Jesus’ ministry, his teachings, healings, the miracles he performs like calming the sea. At the end of the chapter, Jesus is summoned by a ruler of a synagogue whose only child, a twelve year old daughter, was dying. More specifically in the book of Mark in chapter five, verse forty through forty-three reads:

“And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. Taking her by the hand, he said to her, ‘Talitha cumi,’ which means, ‘Little girl, I say to, arise.’ And immediately the girl got up and began walking… and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.”

I can’t account for all the times I chose to lie down with death, with despair. Yet God called me to rise. As I journaled for Carol it became clear the thunder had been another moment God called me to rise. I had listened to that voice and that command for years, but now it was time to respond. To obediently lay down the heavy, painful pieces from the past and allow them to take new life, be born anew. I needed to respond by taking responsibility for the state of my life, more specifically the state of my marriage. I was not a victim, I had agency and the ability to move forward in response. Which looked like apologizing to Lucas. He was not the cause of my anger but had been stung by its blows frequently. It turns out Larry didn’t reject or fire me, he saw the great need for me to sit alone with God to heal. 

Crystal Mountain, April 2018

Lucas’ Dad took us up skiing, it was my first time on skis since I was seven. It was a steep learning curve.

The spring and summer of 2018 I continued to write and meet with Carol. Lucas and I became reacquainted slowly, adding a fresh layer to our friendship we had built years earlier. I was letting the dead things from the past rest. They were finally able to break down, adding nutrition to the soil. The healing was intentional and the timing perfect. We had no idea what the following fall and winter would demand.