“… [A]nd though the merriment was rather boisterous, still it came from the heart and not from the lips; and this is the right sort of merriment, after all.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
In many ways, it’s an awkward photo. Whoever snapped it forgot to turn the flash off, and you can see the glare reflected in the glass of the Andrew Wyeth print on the wall behind us and how it makes our comically wide-open eyes seem even more bright. The six of us are squashed in the kitchen doorway, girls in back, boys in front, seemingly disembodied hands on shoulders making it hard to tell whose arms are around who. I’m pulling a silly face and have opened my mouth as far as I possibly can, as if presenting my teeth to the dentist for examination. And for some reason, all but one of us are wearing blue. It’s a very ordinary photo, by the looks of things—six youngish folks having a good time together at a gathering. What isn’t obvious is that the gathering is my birthday party—and that, for all I know, it could be my last. Or that, in that moment, I am completely, incandescently happy.
Shortly after I turned eight years old, an aneurysm in my brain started leaking and my parents and I learned that I’d been born with something called an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), which essentially meant that a tangled, growing mass of veins and arteries was putting pressure on my brain. If left untreated, it could easily rupture and cause permanent damage or even death. After much research and praying, we decided on gamma radiation therapy, a minimally invasive procedure with a quick recovery period, a relatively low risk (despite the newness of the treatment at the time), and a good success rate. Four months later the procedure went swimmingly, with no complications, and I proceeded to live the next fourteen years of my life AVM-free. Or so we thought.
A week after my twenty-second birthday, I came home late from work one evening and, while I was getting ready to eat dinner, fainted for no apparent reason. Several doctors’ visits and CT scans, MRIs, and arteriograms later, we discovered that the AVM had somehow regrown and that once again one of the arteries in the tangle sported an aneurysm. This time, however, radiation therapy wasn’t an option, as the doctors thought that the affected area of my brain, near which the vision centers were located, couldn’t safely stand another dose of gamma rays. The options were now open-skull brain surgery … or do nothing, with the knowledge that the risk of a bleed increased each year. Surgery was a surprisingly safe procedure, it seemed—the solemn bow-tied neurologist pegged the risk at four percent to six percent—but it came with a six-week recovery period. And plenty of attendant uncertainty on my part. A four-percent chance of something going wrong was slim, sure, but it was my brain. My brain. To do my job I needed a brain and eyes that thought and saw clearly; I needed fingers that would obey my brain’s commands.
What if something did go wrong? What if I died? I wasn’t ready to die yet—I hadn’t even been in love! But even if nothing did go wrong, would I be the same person when I woke up?
From what I remember, my twenty-second year was largely not one marked by merriment; I was angry and resentful, irritable and annoyed by how much the decision to have brain surgery was overshadowing my life, dictating what I could and couldn’t do. Slowly the months ticked by. And slowly—oh, so slowly—my attitude began to change as God softened my heart and opened my eyes to His all-surpassing goodness. I couldn’t die yet because I hadn’t fallen in love? Ha! How could even the best of human loves compare with the steadfast love of God Himself, whose presence I would immediately be in if I did indeed die? What had I been thinking? If I died before I turned twenty-three I would not be missing anything; I’d only be getting to the best part of Life that much sooner. But that which is good and true isn’t always easy.
The year waned to August; my cousin, six months older than me and the closest thing I’d ever had to a blood-related sister, got married. “You’re next,” my uncle said to me at the reception, a little too hilariously. (I had failed to invite anyone to be my “plus-one,” but later found out that the friend I would have asked was a groomsman in a different wedding that very same day.) August slipped to September; my best friend, pregnant with her first child, was put on bed rest with preeclampsia. Shortly afterward, a friend I’d known since childhood had a motorcycle accident and broke his jaw. And then, as we ticked down toward the final weeks before my surgery, I had my shoulder-length hair cut off into a shaggy pixie. I bought a sparkly beaded headband and lots of chocolates. And I started to plan my birthday party.
I grew up playing games. Whenever there was a big enough group at a youth meeting, a church event, or a casual get-together at someone’s house, inevitably we kids would end up playing Ghost in the Graveyard; Moonlight, Starlight; Mafia; Wink; or, possibly my favorite, Murder in the Dark. There’s something exhilarating about the strategy, the plotting, the bluffing involved in those games—not to mention the screams of surprise and out-of-breath laughter attendant with the more active ones. My brain surgery was scheduled to take place in Rochester, Minnesota, on September 28—four days before my twenty-third birthday. So, the weekend before, I invited as many friends as could make it to an epic game of Murder in the Dark, played out on the three levels of my family’s house. At this point I have few, if any, concrete memories of what we did or who won the game. But I do know it was the best time and the most fun I had had in a long time.
Maybe it was the adrenaline rush from jump-scares in the dark, or the sugar from the big bowl of Lindor truffles and Dove Promises, or all the nerves and emotions of the past eleven months coming to a hysterical head. In that moment I felt that it was the most glorious gift to be alive and in the company of good friends, and the happiness bubbled out of me in at-that-time uncharacteristic, uninhibited hugs and hilarity. When the last person left that night, my heart was filled with a joy that did not evaporate with the next morning, but instead stayed with me, accompanying me through the days before my surgery.
“Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described,” G.K. Chesterton writes in his book Orthodoxy. “And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling.”
One sense of the adjective “merry” means “enlivened with gladness or good spirits.” The word also has German roots that carry the connotation both of something pleasant that makes the time pass quickly and something that is in itself short-lived.[1] When I think back to that birthday party and remember the fizzing delight and happiness that overtook me, I often wish I could conjure up that same feeling now. Yet perhaps it was a particular grace God gave for that particular season of my life, a return to the self-forgetfulness of childhood that I had left behind me as a young adult, a softening and expanding of a heart keen on self-preservation. And perhaps merriment is not, after all, a thing to be overanalyzed, but rather a state to be fully enjoyed, for however long it lasts.
In some ways, it’s an awkward photo. We were supposed to be making silly faces, but only a few of us took it seriously—in the front row one friend is sticking her tongue out while her husband is crossing his eyes, and I have two fingers stuck in my mouth to make a grimace any five-year-old would be proud of. The rest of the folks look bemused, or confused, and we’re all dressed in vaguely Victorian-era garb that makes our expressions even more surprising. (One of my pastors is wearing a top hat.)
As it happens, we’re gathered for another game of Murder in the Dark, with a Victorian botanical theme full of props, plot twists, and hijinks galore. This year, I’m turning thirty-seven; no one who came to that other birthday party is present tonight. But, as the game gets underway and we all get into character, I repeatedly find myself doubled over with laughter, tears streaming down my cheeks at some epic “crime scene” or particularly funny accusation. “I’ve stopped time!” a friend yells at one point as she exercises her character’s special ability. For a split second I wish that time could stop, that all moments could be this full of joy and surprise and fun. But I know that, when the night ends and the ravages of the party are cleared away, a trace of our merriment will remain with me, the memories making my days a bit brighter, a bit braver.
And perhaps that’s how merriment’s meant to be.
[1] Read more about the history of the words “merriment” and “merry” at the Online Etymology Dictionary.
The featured image is courtesy of Amelia Freidline and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Amelia M. Freidline lives in the Kansas City suburbs with her parents and a feisty wee terrier named for the tallest mountain in Scotland. She studied journalism, English, and history at the University of Kansas and has worked as a word herder and comma wrangler in food media throughout her professional career. She’s a founding member of The Poetry Pub and has helped edit poetry collections for Bandersnatch Books. She is an amateur poet and writer, a photographer of faeryland, and a wielder of butter, and has self-published several small collections of original writing and photography. Raised on Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Sayers, Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, Amelia hopes to be British if she grows up. She enjoys trees, adventures, marmalade, and great conversations. She loves Jesus because He loved her first.
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