Why do we strive when surrender is so much sweeter?

If we are enough just as we are, why do so many of resist this knowledge, convinced that we must be more and do more, and how can we stop? Inside an MRI machine of all places, I found my answer.

A tunnel of medical design—inspiring reverence for some, terror for others—the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine is thump-thump-thumping and knock-knock-knocking as it peers inside my spine and snaps images.

My eyes closed, headphones on, I hear a chant rise above the din of knocks and thumps: “Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough.”

Like a Greek male chorus, these voices are hushed but insistent, repeating their urgent message over and over.

“What is enough?” I lie there, wondering. Is it my body saying “enough?” Enough with the pain of my low back misery. Is it my soul’s voice pleading with me to once and for all accept that I am enough, just as I am? That I have enough. That I do enough. Perhaps it is an invitation, a pressing question posed by the universe through this machine of modern medical technology:

It is a tangled thread, this question. Like so many of us, I struggle with the sense of “enoughness” in both external achievement and internal acceptance. And yet I am certain there is a reason why this word floated toward me in those frightening few minutes of not knowing what the MRI would reveal. The chorus of “enough” soothed me. When the technician released me from the tunnel and told me I could get up, I felt oddly calm. I knew that whatever the results showed, I would be sufficient to the task of acceptance, to the surrender of what was out of my control, and able to evaluate with a clear mind and calm heart the choices available to me. I would be enough.

Not to leave you in suspense, the MRI did not show anything terribly scary. My secret dark fear of tumors lurking was eliminated. There was no sign of a herniated disc, another source of relief as herniation can often only be addressed with surgery.

Yet the images revealed serious issues requiring medical care, time, the right exercises and interventions, and patience. I have anterolisthesis of L4 over L5 and mild anterolisthesis of L5 over S1 (basically, the slipping forward of vertebra). There’s possible degenerative spondylolysis (age-related breakdown or degeneration in my spine), resulting in lumbar spinal canal stenosis (a narrowing of the spinal canal, which can cause pressure on the spinal cord or nerves that go from your spinal cord to your muscles). I have compression of the dural sac (the membranous sheath that surrounds the spinal cord), severe at L4/L5 and moderate at L5/S1. Like many in our 60s and older, I have degenerative disc disease and severe facet osteoarthritis.

The results were a relief in that they confirmed a diagnosis, what was actually happening in my body. And they also served as a wake-up call, a reminder to honor this one precious body I’ve been granted, the one I am determined to nurse back to health so that if I am lucky enough to get another two decades or more of life on this earth, I can enjoy it as fully as possible. However my healing unfolds, its path—and my ability to rise up to meet it—will be enough.

The word “compression” was jarring. For years—a lifetime, perhaps—I had been trying to compress too much doing, with my back taking the brunt of the work, literally and figuratively. For decades when I was married I was the major or sole income provider for my family. I lived with pride the life of the “can-do woman,” as one friend admiringly put it. I was not only putting bread on the table, but continually working toward my goal of being a published fiction writer while raising my daughters. I worked on staying fit, going to the gym, practicing yoga and taking long walks. After my divorce, my hard-working back turned toward my beloved mother after her diagnosis of dementia and my decision to have her move in with me so I could care for her as the disease progressed.

And yet it is when I think of my mother that the word “enough” brings a lump to my throat. She died a year ago yesterday, two days after my 64th birthday. This was an anniversary that my body was anticipating long before my mind caught up. I realize now that my near daily crying over these past few weeks were not only due to the pain of my low back spasms and frustration with my diminished world but the grief welling up inside me.

There is still so much grief to be felt in my body and expressed through my tears. A year is not that very long when you lose your favorite parent, your touchstone. The grief is tangled up with lingering guilt and shame that I didn’t do enough, that I wasn’t there enough in her final months and weeks. I made the wrenching decision several months before her death to move her to a memory care facility. Emotional and physical care for her had been taking its toll on my back and on my heart and spirit. I was so very tired, soul weary. I recognized this was a necessary decision for both of us, for her safety and round-the-clock care. But still, my body holds onto the remnants of “not-enoughness” when it comes to her final time on this earth.

If I close my eyes, I feel my mother’s arms around me, saying “Shhhhh…Amy. You are enough. You have done enough for me. I love you. It’s okay to let go.” In her eyes, I was always enough. I am trying to remember that.

A year ago, we sat in the garden of the memory care facility in Florida. She was in her wheelchair, holding her face toward the sun. I broke off bits of chocolate cookie and fed them to her, along with sips of juice. This was the twelfth of April, my birthday. She rallied for me that day, summoned herself, her smile, her love. It was the last time she would sit in the sun, the last time she would sit up:

'I wish I could be like a bird in the sky'

Two days later I sat beside her in bed and read to her and stroked her brow and told her the very words I am telling myself these days: “Let go, Mom. You can let go now.” For her, the invitation was to let go of the need to remain for us, her children and grandchildren and great-grandson. For me, today, on this birthday, it is to let go of the grief that is not healing but rather continues to wound me—that I was somehow not enough for her, in the end.

On my 65th birthday this past Saturday my daughter Marielle and her partner Esteban and I were strolling down the market street in Badalona when “Moon River” came on the outdoor sound system. My mother’s favorite song. I clung to my daughter and we hugged long and hard. I believe it was Mom’s birthday greeting, her sweet reminder that she is with me and yes, that I am enough:

“Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' that way./Two drifters off to see the world
There's such a crazy world to see. We're after the same rainbow's end, waiting round the bend/My Huckleberry friend, Moon River, and me.”

I know Mom is toasting this 65th birthday with me.

Later that day Marielle read aloud a poem she had composed at her poetry group meeting a few nights earlier. It was clear that the themes of grief, loss, longing and mother-daughter love have been with her too lately. She gave me permission to share it here:

For the past week I’ve been immersed in a wonderful book that is revelatory to me. It was first recommended to me by my friend

Allison Deraney

my kindred soul and near birthday twin, author of DARE TO BE. Then just last week another Substack friend

Alecia Stevens

who writes A Renaissance Life and has recently been in the depths of grief urged me to read it. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller, a psychotherapist and gifted writer, presents the Five Gates of Grief¹, that go far beyond the grief of losing someone or something we love.

Weller invites us to examine these questions:

How do we learn to carry our grief and not collapse or turn away in denial? How do we come to see grief as vital and necessary and not something only to be endured? To achieve this shift requires a re-visioning of grief, not as an event in our lives—a period of mourning—but as an ongoing conversation that accompanies us throughout life. Grief and loss are with us continually, shaping our walk through life and in some real way, determining how fully we engage our lives…In essence, we are asked to take up an apprenticeship with sorrow.

To regard myself as an apprentice in the ongoing conversation and teachings of grief is much more self-compassionate than the idea that I need to “move on” in a certain amount of time. This is also true of the grief I am feeling over my unexpected, unwanted but here-to-stay (for now) back injury. I cannot wish it away. I am apprenticing myself to the pain, as I have written about, and also its accompanying emotions of loss, anger, grief and longing.

As to the question I posed at the start of the essay, the one I imagined in the rumblings of the MRI machine, “How would I live the rest of my days if I were to decide that everything I am and everything I have right now is enough?”

The answer is: Exactly as I am now. Surrounded by love, and loving in return. Moving slowly and intentionally through my days. Heeding the call of my creativity and my soul to write and to share with all of you. Remaining connected to myself and to others and to this beautiful, miraculous world.

LET’S CHAT

This is a safe space to share and your comments are always so appreciated.

How would you answer this question above? Have you struggled with not feeling like you were enough or had enough or did enough? How are you responding? In what ways are you apprenticing yourself to grief?

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1. The Five Gates are: The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose; The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love (places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives); The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World; The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive, and the Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief.