mirror, mirror

I’ve occasionally heard the phrase, “It’s like looking in a mirror,” and chances are, so have you. Of course, I know what it means, though I’d never experienced it personally until yesterday afternoon.

I wanted to write and publish this post last night, but I was so moved—and by “moved” I mean wrecked—by how the whole mirror thing even happened that I really needed to just be still and quiet for a time. To reflect on it and pray about it.

When something happens that moves me like this, though, I usually want to write about it right away. I want to catch it while I can still feel it, before time starts softening the edges and I forget the depth of meaning behind it. Because I don’t only want to tell you what happened; I want to somehow put enough of the emotion onto the page so that you can feel it, too. That maybe something in my story will reverberate somewhere in yours.

Cue the William Agusto.

I was leaving work yesterday, making my way from the swinging kitchen door to the front door of the restaurant, when a guest flagged me down with a fluttering hand. Her other arm was around her husband, who was slumped into her one-sided embrace—eyes open but fixed in two different directions, his skin drained of all color.

My first thought was that he’d had a stroke or perhaps a seizure.

She was trying to communicate with him, which appeared impossible in the moment, and I asked if she wanted us to call an ambulance. She replied that he didn’t want to cause a scene.

Well, scenes and, ahem, liability be damned.

I quickly alerted two managers and the server to what was happening, told them in detail what I’d seen and what needed to be done, and then I high-tailed it out of there like my feet were on fire.

I totally get how that sounds. Like I didn’t care about what was happening. Like there was something cold or calculated about leaving when this woman and her husband were clearly in distress.

The truth is that I cared so much I couldn't stay.

Because when I was standing at their table, taking in the full scene and trying to make sense of what was happening, I finally looked her full in the face.

And that’s when I saw myself.

February 2001.

Jeff on our bathroom floor at 4:30 in the morning, having his first seizure—the one that would lead to a terminal diagnosis of stage 4 metastatic melanoma and a prognosis of 3-6 months of life left to live.

It was the single tear rolling down this woman’s face.

Her frightened expression. Her confusion and helplessness to alleviate what was happening. Her uncertainty about what to do next. The look of someone feeling utterly and completely lost.

Oh, my God, how I remember EXACTLY what that felt like.

All of it jumbled together in the shortest of moments, while somehow time also slows down. Everything around you, even your own words, sounds like you’re underwater.

In an instant, I was back there.

Not just that morning, but to every day that followed.

The rush of emotion was so immediate and so overwhelming that I needed to leave. I needed to get home. I needed to be around my children.

There was another day during Jeff’s illness when I was driving him home from a medical procedure. Whatever had been done involved a very small incision at the base of his head—I honestly can’t remember anymore exactly what the procedure was.

But I remember what happened afterward.

Jeff knew a seizure was coming. “Don’t freak out,” he said to me, almost as though he were telling me to add strawberry yogurt to the grocery list. Nonchalant as hell.

And then he had a grand mal seizure.

The incision opened and there was blood everywhere; on him, on me, on the passenger seat of our car. We were stuck in the middle of rush-hour traffic, and it took the ambulance almost 45 minutes to reach us.

Jeff was pretty much out of it while we waited.

I was an absolute disaster, and after we got him to the hospital and his sister came to be with him, I left to get home to our boys. I needed to smell them and hear them and hold them; to feel their love and light - and life - surrounding me.

Looking back over yesterday, I think what really happened was that I recognized something in the woman’s face that I couldn’t have recognized in myself in 2001.

Twenty-five years ago, I was inside it, living it. I couldn’t stand across the room and see that young woman whose husband was suddenly, frighteningly unwell. I couldn’t see her terror or feel compassion for her from the outside because I was her.

Yesterday, for perhaps the first time ever, I got to see her.

I’ve read about going back to yourself as a child—to a moment when something difficult or traumatic was happening—and imagining your adult self tenderly embracing that little girl, whispering the things she needed to hear. Telling her she’s loved. Telling her she’s going to be okay.

Yesterday felt a little like that.

Except I didn’t go looking for the woman I used to be.

I found her sitting at a table in a restaurant.

As backwards as it may seem, I saw myself in the expression on another woman’s face. Her fear allowed me to recognize my own. Her helplessness reminded me how helpless I had felt. And somehow looking at her gave me something I didn't know I'd been missing all these years:  compassion for the woman I was back then.

As I’ve been writing this post, in the back of my mind I’ve wondered what 2026 Annalea would say to 2001 Annalea if she could go back and sit beside her on that bathroom floor.

Not some long-winded speech; there’d be no time for that. And certainly not reassurances that everything was going to be okay because it wasn’t going to be okay. Jeff was going to die and everything in her life would be forever changed.

I would tell her that she didn’t have to know what to do. That there was no correct way to be a young wife whose husband was dying. That being afraid didn’t make her weak. That wanting to run home and bury her face in her children wasn’t avoidance. That she would carry something impossibly heavy and do it the best she knew how.

That she would survive this time.

Yesterday, after seeing that woman, I went home to my children again.

Same instinct.

Same refuge.

Different woman coming through the door.