Clergy & Congregational Coach
laurastephensreed logo2 (1).png

Blog

Helping clergy and congregations navigate transitions with faithfulness and curiosity

My blog has moved to Substack! You can find new articles weekly there.

Use the button below to search the blog archives on this website.

Mortality and middle age

It didn’t happen when I turned 30 or 40, like I expected.

It happened this year, my 42nd. I began to wrestle with my mortality in more than an academic sense.

It started with the unexplained illness and eventual death of Rachel Held Evans, which hit me hard. I felt a heaviness in my body and soul that was new for me. I can’t explain exactly why. I admired her work, but I did not know her personally. I think my reaction was a soup of knowing that she was putting so much good out into the world, and yet she was physically gone. That she was younger than me. That she left behind a baby and a preschooler who will have to learn about their mom through others’ memories.

Around the same time that Rachel Held Evans contracted her illness, a high school classmate of mine lost her toddler suddenly, also without a clear medical diagnosis. Every day my classmate posts a picture or video of her curious, rosy-cheeked daughter on social media. Every day I look and I “like” what she has shared. I’m sure this child would have been – likely already was – smart and feisty like her mama. I am grateful to my classmate for inviting her friends into her grief process, and it socks me in the gut daily.

And then, in August, I walked that thin line myself between being here among the living or being a (hopefully) blessed memory. I was run over by an SUV while crossing a busy downtown street on foot. I was pretty gruesome to look at, and I had a couple of internal injuries as well. A few inches in one direction or another, and I would have been on the other side of that thin line. For weeks I fought off the absurd notion that I was living in an alternate dimension and that in another, I had been those few inches forward or backward. Four months later, I still think nightly about my first month home from the hospital – about how every movement took effort, about how I couldn’t find a position to sleep in because I had on open wound on my face and a goose egg on the back of my head, about how I had to cull stories about car accidents or death from my podcast playlist because they were so triggering.

2019 slopped a healthy dollop of reality onto my plate. And yet, facing my mortality through others’ experiences and my own has strengthened my resolve. I want to put as much good out into the world as I can. I want to notice all that is life-giving. I want to be here, really here, while I yet breathe.

I hope you’ll join me.

Laura Stephens-Reed