To July

Death is just the moment

when the dying ends.

Eef Barzelay

Ah, July.

Sometimes I arrive at this month with many words. Other times I’m just speechless. Faces of people I love rotate on an ever-moving carousel in my mind. My emotions feel so big that, often, my body doesn’t know what to do with them. Some of you will know what I am referencing and others will not. For those of you who don’t, July holds two anniversaries of two very important people who were extremely close to me who died way before anyone on earth expected.

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Anna is the sun captured in a person with a laugh so infectious she can make anyone sick with joy. She was just freshly 17 with a birthday on July 4th which we celebrated together just 11 days before she died. Her departure was sudden, tragic and difficult to process as I was involved in the incident myself. We celebrated her with songs and stories for many months. I miss the time we had together because it felt easy and simple with her. As an adult I crave that now and I know that I am wiser because I knew her.

Anna Wright 7.15.07

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Debra is my Mom. It’s hard for me describe her this year because I think I’m learning in a new way what being a mom represents. So for now, simply, she is my Mom.

Debra Wellman 7.11.13

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These deaths blew apart my entire world in ways that I’m still trying to understand. I couldn’t have fully dealt with the capacity of what it would do to me and to my community at the time because I didn’t see the effects immediately. I do see them now and I’m running to God and asking Him to heal the pain in whatever ways I need. It’s traumatic, person-changing and complex to go through such up-close and personal experiences of dying.

So, my emotions are complex in response to these dates of July 11th and July 15th. They are grief and joy; acceptance and deep sadness. They are memories with moments of connection with these two irreplaceable people and our communities that surrounded us. They are also memories of the deeply traumatic and terrible parts. I think the best way to describe it is that I’m really tired in July. There’s also celebrations of birthday’s for people I dearly love and graduation parties and lots of good things that remind me of life continuing onward. One month shouldn’t hold so many things at once. It hardly seems fair for one body to feel so many things.

Since I don’t have many more words than this, I think I’ll share a song because music and lyrics have carried me through many years of processing.

The words, “Death is just the moment when the dying ends” could sound morbid but I don’t think that’s the intent. It’s not this perpetual skepticism that our existence on earth is just to head towards death and then die. I think it’s this hope that when our time has come to die there’s a promise of peace that’s ordained by God where the chapter of human decay and difficulty comes to a close. Where God’s dwelling is with humanity how He intended and He will live with us. We will be His and He will be ours in full access. There will no longer be grief, crying or pain because the previous ways of life and humanity passed away.

Everything will be new.

That is the hope behind these words for those of us who have seen death and know that it’s not the end of life; but the end of death.

In Memory of Debra Jeanne Wellman

and

Anna Elise Wright

July 2022