Watching

Wit

The house is quiet tonight; it's just me, the dog, and the keyboard making noise. Romeo and Juliet was calling everyone else's name, but not mine. Home was where I needed to be.

I chose to watch Wit by myself, and I think that is why it hit so hard. Vivian Bearing was terribly alone through her illness; her one and only visitor comes at the end. Her esteemed mentor crawls up onto the bed, cradles Dr. Bearing in her arm, and reads her a children's story; I was overcome with weeping as she comforted her with inarticulate murmurings. This professor of 17th century poetry, a deeply intellectual woman and lover of the English language, needed wordless comfort and human kindness as she suffered. To come to the end of life, filled with regret and sorrow and fear, and to do it all ALONE, must be terrible. I wanted to leap into the screen and drive her to the hospital, call another friend to have them turn off the lights she was worried about having left on, and sit by her bedside as she decided whether or not she should be resuscitated when her heart inevitably stopped beating. It was the aloneness that did me in.

Our vacation could be summed up as a friendship binge of the best kind. Each turn in the road meant relationships made or strengthened, memories recorded, commitments deepened, and stories to be continued. It was such fun, but tonight it is good to be alone. The return home has been about doing and going, not about sitting and thinking. As I get older, I find I need the quiet more to balance out all the activity. Emma Thompson's gut-wrenching portrayal of Dr. Vivian Bearing reminded me, though, that being surrounded by people and relationships and the richness of human contact is a precious part of my life.

And so, the delicate dance between quiet time and time spent with family and friends and important strangers will continue. For me, it is a constant matter for prayer. I have come to honest introversion as a forty-something-er, so I bob and weave with waves of confusion about what is a true need for alone time and what isn't. I am confident, however, that the God who declared, "I will never leave you nor forsake you" cares even more about the answer to that question than I do, and I will rest in that. For now, I am ready to hear the crunch of the tires on the driveway so I can welcome home my family. It's not going to last forever, these busy child-rearing days. I don't want to waste a day.