There are moments in life when all you want is to go back. Before the diagnosis. Before the phone call. Before the thing that changed everything. You want to reach your hand into the past and pull yourself back to the version of life that existed before any of this happened. I know this feeling. When my sister, Hannah, became quadriplegic, our whole family wanted it to be a nightmare we could wake from. We wanted to rewind. Return. Undo.
But life was never ours to control in that way. Because once a bell has been rung, you cannot unring it. You heard it. It was real. The question is never how we go back to who we were before; the question is, can we sit together with who we are now? Can we stay present enough right now to be in the complicated tangle of heartbreak and anger and sadness and love to get curious about what may come next?
Repair doesn’t ask us to return. It asks us to enter something harder and more creative than that—the process of not knowing. Sometimes—and this is the part we don’t talk about enough—repair looks like an ending. Not a failure. Not a giving up. Just an honest reckoning with what can no longer hold. Some things cannot be patched. Some relationships, some versions of ourselves, some ways of living—they have run their course. Letting them go IS the repair. It is perhaps the hardest kind. But sometimes repair looks like something else entirely—like finally arriving to what has been right in front of you all along.
I’ve been learning this through my sister. Hannah is 42 years old. Years ago, an acute illness left her quadriplegic—unable to walk, unable to speak, her whole life rerouted in a matter of weeks. And, for a long time, our family waited. We kept our eyes fixed on the horizon of “normal,” scanning for signs that the Hannah we remembered was on her way back to us. We were waiting for this to be over. Waiting for her to walk again. Waiting for the version of her we recognized.
Last month, I visited my sister and I sat with her in her room. I was exhausted and I truly had nothing left to give, so I just sat there. I wasn’t trying to fix anything or assess anything or figure out the next step in her care. I just sat with her. And in this space of sitting, I realized I had spent years looking past her, looking at all her hospital bills, appointments, nutritional supplements that would help her, looking for ways to bring her back, and I never actually fully arrived to where she actually was. Right in front of me. She is HERE, funny, opinionated, and loves her animals fiercely. She is fully, completely herself—not a diminished version of who she used to be, but a person I am only now beginning to truly know. What Hannah needs most from us right now is for us to get curious about who she is—today. To stop waiting for her to return and start showing up for who she already is.
I’m practicing this same curiosity in my own body, though I won’t pretend it comes easily. I am 47 years old and I am in perimenopause. My daughter is 10 and she is in the tender, trembling beginning of adolescence. Her fifth-grade class is learning about “Growing and Changing” right now, and one evening she looked at me and said, “Mom, you’re in adult puberty while I’m in adolescent puberty.” I laughed out loud. And then I sat with it for a long time. Because she was right. We are both standing at the threshold of a body we don’t fully recognize yet. Both of us in the in-between.
There is real grief here that I don’t want to rush past. My childbearing years are quietly closing. My husband and I talked about a third child once—our twins gave us a very clear, very loud no on that—life moved forward, and now that door is closing on its own terms, not mine. And there is something particular about a loss you never got to choose. A grief without a moment you can point to. No funeral. No date on a calendar. Just a quiet closing.
Some mornings I feel that loss like a low hum in my chest. The silver threading through my hair, the face in the mirror that is recognizably mine and also somehow different. There is grief in that too. Real grief. Not vanity… grief.
The beauty industry would have me fight all of it. And honestly? I have. I’ve tried the products, done the treatments, sat in the laser chair trying to hold on to something familiar. I understand the impulse completely because I have lived it and I don’t think any of that is wrong. But fighting to go back and getting curious about who you are now—those are two very different things. And I don’t want to spend so much energy on the first that I completely miss the second.
My son recently overheard a woman being told she looked like her daughter’s sister. The woman beamed: “Wow, thank you. What a compliment.” My son turned to me genuinely confused. “Why would you want to look like someone’s sister when you’re their mom?” I didn’t have an answer for him.
You cannot love a body you refuse to know. If I spend these years trying to be 32 again, I will miss 47 entirely. I will miss who I am becoming. My daughter is not wishing she were still five. She is tumbling headlong into herself—curious and a little terrified and completely alive. I want to meet her there. I want to meet myself there too.
In a yoga class here in our community, our beloved teacher, Mary Beth, brought us a teaching from the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön. She writes that life is not a puzzle to be solved but a continuous process of falling apart and coming back together again. Things don’t really get solved, she says. They disintegrate. They reassemble. And the process repeats—always with missing pieces, never returning to exactly what they were before.
I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Because what if repair isn’t the exception? What if it isn’t the hard, heavy thing we brace ourselves for—the thing we dread or avoid or don’t know how to begin? What if falling apart and coming back together is simply the essence of being human? As natural as breathing. Conflict and repair. Falling apart and coming back together. Not once. Not twice. But continuously for the whole of a life.
We don’t have to be afraid of the falling apart. We don’t have to rush the coming back together. We don’t have to pretend the missing pieces aren’t missing. We just have to stay curious about who we are becoming in the middle of it all—on this side of the wound we never asked for, in this body we are still learning to know, beside the people we are learning to see clearly as they are now.
The scar is real. The missing pieces are real. And so is the question that lives inside all of it: Who are we now, and are we willing to meet each other here?
“What if falling apart and coming back together is simply the essence of being human?”
