Introduction
I didn't realize how bad it was until I was already out, and getting out meant not seeing it clearly enough to stay. This is the piece where I look back at that leaving — the move from Vermont back in December, the betrayal underneath the boxes and miles, the community I thought I was holding while it was holding me. It's also the piece where a missing song from my father's service told me something I hadn't let myself know: that my own knowing was intact, even from the distance, even after everything. Grace runs through all of it — not the grace I give myself in doses on the hard days, but the grace I'm learning to simply be. I'm still finding the edges of this telling. What follows is where I've gotten to so far.
I'm realizing I didn't realize how bad it was. And now I'm realizing how bad it was. And it wasn't just bad — it was awful.
This sentence took me a long time to be able to say. Not because the words are complicated. Because of how I got out.
To get away from the betrayal of all of it, I had to almost not be aware of it. To let myself go. The not-seeing wasn't weakness or denial doing me harm. The not-seeing was the mechanism of my leaving. I had to be unaware enough to walk, so that later, from somewhere safer, I could become aware of it and let it go.
Leaving Vermont was the part you could watch happen. The physical move was real, boxes and miles. But the actual departure was from the betrayal, and that one happened in stages, and some of the stages only completed long after the truck was unpacked.
There's a judgment that likes to visit me about all of this. The judgment creeps in and says: Cheryl, all that cool stuff you've been doing these last couple of months, you should have done that six months ago. A year ago. The should. Always the should. This is how I'm used to dealing with myself.
And when I look at what I was actually doing during the time the should points at, here's what I find: I was teaching. I was holding a space for people to connect and learn and heal and grow. I thought I was providing that space for them. What I understand now is that the space held me too. Having somewhere to stand and something to give is what got me through. The room I kept open for everyone else turned out to be the room I survived in.
Then came the picking-up-again. When I came back in March, the community wasn't the same thing exactly. And in a certain sense, the community couldn't be, because I was different, and everyone in it had changed and shifted and done things in their lives. The need was different. Any group of people, coming together again, ends up reforming. So we've been going back through the whole group dynamics of it all. It's okay. This is life.
Here is where the song comes in.
A year ago, my dad died. I didn't go to the service. Someone sent me the program from it, and I looked at the pages, and I knew something immediately, with the kind of knowing that doesn't need to check its work: whoever planned that service didn't know my dad. There was a song missing. Amazing Grace. When my mom passed, he insisted the song be in the service. When each of his parents passed, he insisted again. That was his song. He always felt like he lived in God's amazing grace.
The non-religious part of me fights a tad with that sentence. And the part of me that understands his motion in life doesn't fight at all. That's how he expressed himself. The song was how he said what he knew about where he stood.
So a program for him without the song told me everything about who had planned it, and, strangely, told me something about myself. I knew my father. Even from the distance, even after everything, I knew what belonged in that room, and the knowing was mine and nobody could force it from me.
I remember a Sunday school class on grace, the teacher explaining what grace was. It obviously made an impression, because the memory is still here all these years later. And lately grace has been circling back to me by other roads. Give yourself grace, the saying goes, and the saying is good, and lately I've been holding grace another way. Not something I administer to myself in doses on my worst days. Something I am. I am grace.
That may be what actually carried me out. Not a program, not a plan, nothing I performed correctly. The not-seeing that protected me until seeing was survivable. The community that held me while I thought I was holding it. The missing song that showed me my own knowing was intact. Grace, the whole way down, closer than I ever thought to look.
Somewhere my father is singing his song. I'm learning to sing mine. I AM. I am grace.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come:
'tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home.