Submerged

It captured our world this week. The submerged vessel that could not be found. Five people lost at sea in search of the Titanic wreckage thirteen thousand feet below the surface. As rescuers searched, the media talked of how their oxygen was running out, what it must be like in the darkness – and there was a knocking sound, could that have been them, reaching out for help?

When I learned that those five individuals had been sealed inside the sub, that it had been locked tightly from the outside, I got the weebie jeebies. And to go to those depths into the darkness and with the extreme pressure? I couldn’t imagine.

We know now that the sub likely imploded when they first descended, their deaths horrifically and yet somehow mercifully, over in an instant.

But the thought of the knocking remained with me, haunted me.

I couldn’t help but think about the whole situation as I walked one of my babies through another midnight melt.

Depression, anxiety, trauma – they are a bit like that submerged vessel. Down, down, down to old wreckage, holding a heart captive in darkness and under extreme pressure.

I thought of the knocking. How sometimes those sealed inside that place are reaching for help. They can’t open it themselves. They need help from the outside.

Someone to hear.

Someone to see.

Someone to break them out.

Oh how I want to be that person – for my children, for others. I want to hear the knocking, to pay attention, to crack open the door and relieve the darkness.

And then I think of our own wreckage in the depths of our story. How we revisit that wreckage over and over and over again. Some media outlets have now disclosed that the structure of the ocean sub was weakened by the many trips it had taken into the deep.

And that’s why it imploded.

Not unlike our hearts.

Truth is we have to look at those places. We have to visit the wreckage of the past. And oftentimes, we need someone else to relive it with us – to listen to our stories, hear our hurt, open our sealed heart to let some light in. Or we get the privilege of doing that for someone else. We listen for their knocking, break open the seal and help them escape the trauma.

But then there comes a time to put the wreckage behind us. To stop revisiting it over and over again. To not weaken our frame by sitting in that pressure as we hover around, and sit in, and mull over the wounds that tragedy left behind.

It’s a balance. Tending to, but not losing ourselves in the past. Looking at it, but then reaching for the surface, coming up into the light and leaving it behind. 

And then helping others to do the same.