Running Up That Hill: Death, Regret, and the Journey Forward

“And if I only could make a deal with God and get him to swap our places” (Placebo, Running Up That Hill, originally by Kate Bush). 

Side note, before we start, Placebo’s cover of Running Up That Hill is one of the greatest covers I've ever heard. 

Five years ago, around this time, my father's health was in rapid decline and he would only live a few weeks past his 72nd birthday. When I hear the lyrics of Running Up That Hill, I think about death. The first time I heard it was during the season four premiere of The OC and a scene about grief. 

Someone asked me recently which hardships I've lived through wouldn't I change and why? I gave them about a ten point answer that I'm still thinking about. I carry the weight of death on my soul every day and I wouldn't change any of it for any reason. I don't say that lightly. Living with cerebral palsy is hard sometimes. Living in the aftermath of my parents life of addiction, dysfunction, mental illness, and their passings is hard every day. Living with trauma triggers, flashbacks, and all of the embedded religious shame that I've experienced is hard. I wouldn't change any of it. 

I only have one regret that I'd take back. That's telling a long-time friend we couldn't be friends anymore over a decade ago. I think about that daily. I have other regrets but I still wouldn't change those. I wouldn't change my career highs and lows. I wouldn't change my tumultuous religious journey that I finally walked away from a few years ago. 

Now, back to death and Running Up That Hill. It breaks my heart that my parents are gone. Losing my father tore me open. I wouldn't take it back. Before my mom's overdose, when I was twenty four, we had a volatile relationship to say the least. Her death and the way she died forced me to confront a lot of things in life. It's in fact quite possible that I would still be an Evangelical Christian had my mom lived. I was introduced to the Lutheran Church in the throes of my grief over my mom's death. That set the course for my ministry career. 

Regardless of how my ministry career turned out, I'm grateful for it as I wrote previously in My Love Letter to Ministry. Sometimes you just need “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares” (Personal Jesus, as performed by Johnny Cash). The “things on [my] chest [I] need to confess” (Personal Jesus, Depeche Mode), are simply that two things are true at once. The deaths of people, the death of my ministry career and religious faith, and the death of the life I once had tore me to pieces and I wouldn't take them back because I wouldn't have the wisdom I do today. 

Would I like my youth back? Sure. I didn't used to be in pain all the time. But I like that I'm not certain about everything anymore. I like that I understand the temporality of existence so that I can hold on and let go accordingly. I like that having CP forces me to look at the world differently. I like that I work in libraries instead of churches. I'm grateful for the understanding that I can't have today without where I've been and what I've lost. 

That's not to say that I've arrived at contentment and don't want to change anything about my life. Far from it. I just wouldn't take back most of what I've lost. Even the death of my father. There's a hole in my soul from losing my father. And, losing my father set me free to grow and learn new things about life. 

I've tried making deals with God over all the things that I've lost. At the end of the day, that's part of the journey to acceptance. It doesn't make any of this stuff any easier. It doesn't mean that I don't want better things in life. I want peace for myself and the world that I live in. I'd like to say that I'm done making deals with God and that I wouldn't trade places with anybody. If resilience has taught me anything, I know that's not true. While I might not intend or have the desire to change anything that I've endured or lost up to this point, that's when I look at it from the whole picture of the person I've become. I don't want to go back to who I was in my twenties, except maybe physically. I like the fact that I understand this stuff differently. I like the fact that I have tools to deal with the scars of my trauma. It's like getting promoted at work in some regard, you can be grateful for where you've been and even miss it sometimes, but you can't go backwards. Wishing for that doesn't serve me even if the pain runs deep – deep enough to want to make a deal with God.