Earlier this fall, my daughter turned 9 years old. As I was planning her birthday party—a doll theme because Barbie can still do anything in our house—her grandfather lay in the hospital eight hours away. Doctors could not identify the exact problem that landed my father-in-law there, but they knew he was suffering a series of conditions, including pneumonia and other infections. They told us these should have been getting better, but—strangely—they weren’t.
My husband and I both work at colleges. Our semesters started the same week as my daughter’s birthday celebration and my father-in-law’s hospitalization. Our daughter’s school year started around the same time. Extracurriculars have been ramping up for her and her brother: Scouts, gymnastics, dance, Latin club. Religious education at our parish also has been added to our ever-burgeoning list of activities.
New beginnings, days bristling with excitement: This is the regular music of September for our family. But in the best of circumstances, it is still a delicate balance. So when my father-in-law became sick, and my husband left for another state to tend to him, the music took on a cacophonous tone.
It did not help that our family car broke down that week. A friend drove me to and from work for a few days. Since then, we have been renting cars to get by. Like a domino chain, everything seemed to fall apart. And this type of chaos rarely stays confined neatly to one area. A failing kitchen appliance followed the car’s demise.
Yet somehow, in between increasingly dire-sounding phone calls from hospital rooms and blowing out hot pink candles atop buttercream icing, our family was supposed to remain functioning. Commemorating birth. Contemplating death. Shuttling from one activity to the next. Noticing, a few days in, a flunked social studies test. Noticing, the next day, the rising number of unread emails in my inbox. Trying our best not to notice the laundry piles we’re all tripping over on the living room floor. We’ll deal with that later has become the refrain of this new September music.
And yet, everything we are facing feels like it requires us to deal with all of it now. In fact, we’re living all of it now. The prospect of death, the reminder of birth, both ever present. As I write this, my father-in-law is still in the intensive care unit in the hospital. My daughter is still waiting to enjoy our family’s birthday tradition, where she gets to choose lunch at a restaurant. My husband and I are still in the throes of working, grieving, waiting, worrying, celebrating, living, shuttling.
We are still living in the middle of it all. As a literature professor, I must offer a reminder that you, dear readers, have begun reading this snippet about my life in medias res—or in the middle—just like the famous epics The Odyssey and The Iliad begin. But unlike these epics, there is no sweeping narrative arc or character development I am waiting to reveal, or at least not that I’m aware of yet. Instead, what I’m sharing is the middle portion of a life of a rather middling person dealing with middling problems that only feel epic to my husband and me right now.
Yet I suspect a few of you might be able to relate to this in medias res chaos.
Although I readily admit I’ve felt isolated some days, millennials like my spouse and myself are increasingly becoming part of what the Pew Research Center has termed “the sandwich generation.” Like Gen X before us, many members of my generation are juggling the work of caring for both aging parents and younger children. We are the peanut butter and jelly holding it all together, tending to the very old and the very young. And let me tell you: I feel like I’m spread fairly thin right now.
I’m not writing this article to lament, even if I’ve had moments when, like Job, I’ve cried out in frustration. (OK, to be honest, I’ve done so often, singing off-key to Alanis Morissette in my car, during the rare instances when it’s working.) Rather, I’m writing this article because, in these past two weeks, caught between life and death, I’ve realized that all of us humans, in some way, are always caught in the middle. We’re all in the middle of God’s time. All of us are waiting somewhere in between the Creation and the Second Coming. We’re all dealing with what has been and what will be, living in the chaos of now.
Sometimes, it feels as if there’s relative peace for a while. Life feels as if it’s rolling along smoothly. James Taylor is the soundtrack. Other times, we’re forced, whether or not we planned on it, to focus on that practice of memento mori, remembering our deaths are imminent because the realities of life and death often converge. Sometimes we, too, become ill. Our bodies aren’t what they once were either. Love, angst and worry alike remind us of our mortality. This is when Alanis pops on our playlists.
For those of us who are living in the sandwich generation, sometimes it feels so much is falling apart that we don’t need much reminding that we, too, will die. No, instead we need to remember that even in the middle of dealing with whatever big thing is happening now, and while barely getting to whatever little thing we can get done today, and while staring at everything piles and piles of things for us to do later: We are alive.
There are many Catholic essays and articles about memento mori. Yet memento vivere, my fellow friends in the sandwich generation, is the point of this essay.
Remember, too, that you must live. Even in the middle, my middle-aged, millennial friends, remember you, too, must live.
In 2 Cor 4:16-18, Paul, who scholars suggest was in his late 30s to early 40s when he wrote these letters to the church, offered this wisdom: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
On the surface, our bodies, our lives and everything around us often seems like it is fraying all at once. But our bodies, and our time on Earth for that matter, are always fraying, even if we notice our aches and pains and the time ticking more during some spans of our lives than others.
The reality of living in a temporal, material world is that stability is always a myth.
In his “millennial” wisdom, Paul shifts our focus to the unseen renewal happening “inwardly” and “day by day.” The moments of grace—the shared laughter over birthday candles, the patience in caring for our children, the prayers whispered in hospital chapels—are not fleeting. They carry weight beyond the physical world because they speak to God’s eternal work within and around us daily. They are kairos moments, God revealing himself to us and renewing us in his time.
This, too, is part of living. We must not forget to look for God’s revelations in all the small moments, in the chatter of our children in the backseats of cars and the conversations in hallways with siblings that shift suddenly from reality shows and football to the meaning of life. We must not miss the kairos moments God offers us during times when the music of the season is irregular, offbeat.
Paul’s wisdom resonates, but so does a meme I often see floating around social media that states: “Adulthood is saying, ‘But after this week, things will slow down a bit’ over and over until you die.” Yet these “things” are the stuff that builds lives. They are those middle moments that remind us we are living, those moments when we might feel as if we are “losing heart,” but which Paul reminds us are being “renewed day by day.”
