Still Here

Notes on survivor's guilt

I was driving home from a meeting late Saturday, in the kind of rain that somehow makes the night sky darker, with my friend K, when he said, “It’s wild that we’re still here.”

I said, “Yeah. I dunno man….It’s a miracle.”

We both laughed at the word, at its size and its church-basement exhaustion. Then we went quiet while the wipers kept up their small argument with the windshield.

I keep returning to that this week. Because what does it mean to still be here? Especially when others, our beloveds, are not?

We’re both forty-one. K got clean at eighteen. I got clean at twenty-five. For a long time, those seven years felt like a canyon. Early recovery does that: locates someone farther along a road you’re not sure is real, then asks you to measure the distance in a currency you don’t have. Now the gap feels like nothing. Or like the kind of nothing that becomes something if you sit with it long enough. Two people kept doing the same impossible thing until the impossible thing became, somehow, the long thing. Just a life.

That’s what I mean when I say miracle. Not spectacle. The bewildering fact of continuous living [despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty ¹ ]. The way a life becomes possible one ordinary day at a time, until, years later, you find yourself in a car with a friend you’ve known for twenty years, rain dragging its hands across the glass, and you’re both still here.

I continually walk into these rooms filled with holy light and forget it is there because I no longer have to squint against it. What a privilege that is, and how terrible. But maybe that terribleness is what calls me back to noticing, back to working out my salvation with fear and trembling?

Maybe this is one of the strange mercies of survival: the light that once hurt to enter can become the very thing that binds you together. I have to continually remind myself that every story about illumination began in the dark, not by accident but by structural necessity. When anyone finally comes into the light, it hurts. Not out of cosmic cruelty, but because that is what happens to any creature who has dwelled in darkness for too long. Brightness will always be more than a broken thing can hold.

Then, gradually, it becomes less unbearable. Your eyes adjust, or your perspective widens. Until one night, you say “yeah” to your friend in a car in the rain, and what you mean is: I still love this life. Against the loss. Against every version of ourselves that once mistook pain for prophecy. Blake said we were put here “to learn to bear the beams of love.” Some nights, I think that's all I'm doing — still learning, slowly, to bear them.

K and I were both demolished in our early thirties. The kind of demolition where the outer life and the inner life come apart at the same time, and there is nowhere to stand that isn’t rubble. And neither of us got high. Sometimes I can forget what a miracle that was. Sometimes I want to because I can barely bear the grace of it. Yeats knew that things fall apart, that the center cannot hold. What he doesn’t tell us is what the afterlife of our lives sounds like. Not revelation. Just two middle-aged former junkies in a car in the rain, laughing about the miracle of living in and through the dark.

In my twenties, I couldn’t imagine that. I used to stand in the driveway and imagine the pyre I would make of myself. Springtime lilacs. That dandelion smell that means the world doesn’t care whether you are in it. And what I remember isn’t the despair. It’s that underneath it, almost too quiet to hear, there was something in me that wanted to live. It didn’t feel like enough to build anything on. But it was there.

I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped building that imaginary pyre, which means it didn’t happen in a moment. It took years for me to learn how to live in the world without hurting myself. Grace, if that’s what it was, didn’t announce itself. I just noticed one day that I was still here. And then, on another, I realized I wanted to be here tomorrow.

I know how that can sound. I know the way the story goes wrong, the way it implies the people we lost were less ready, less worthy. I don’t believe that. Many of them were more ready and more deserving than I ever was. They are still gone. So what I’m describing isn’t recovery. Recovery is what you do. This was something that was done to me — something that looked into whatever I still was, found that small part of me that wanted to live, and raised it from perdition. I don’t know what that was. I don’t know why it happened for me and not for them. I was in the dark, and then I wasn’t, and the distance between those two facts is not one I traveled by myself.

Being lifted asks something back. Not repayment. A direction. A permanent reorientation away from yourself and toward whatever might still be possible. You answer when someone calls from the pit because you remember exactly how dark it was, and because somebody answered for you once. But more often than that, it is about living a life that you don’t have to escape from.

The real miracle for me is that I have been restored. Not to who I was before. But to something I had genuinely stopped believing was possible. And the parts that couldn’t be restored became something else — something I never would have chosen and can no longer imagine being without.

Oh, friend, whoever is reading this in whatever dark or ordinary room: this life is something else. And so is the relentless, joy-mired duty of having been lifted. Of waking up one more time to the world’s impossible beauty when so many others, our beloveds, our almost-selves, the ones who deserved this just as much, have not.

There’s a scene in Six Feet Under I keep coming back to. David Fisher, hollowed out by something unsurvivable, sees his dead father, who says, “You hang onto your pain like it means something. Let it go. You can do anything, you lucky bastard. You’re alive.”

“It can’t be so simple,” David says.

“What if it is?”

I think about that a lot. What if it is? Because that inexplicable, transformed, holy part of myself keeps petitioning the rest of me to believe it.

1. https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving