Words In The Waiting

Last night was horrendous.

I’m quite sure it wasn’t as awful for me as it was for Mike and his colleagues as they bunkered down in a small room at the back of the house in Port Vila and wondered whether the walls would withstand the wind, but it was still pretty bad on my end.

I was up until 11pm and then again at 3am when a small visitor marched into my bedroom and climbed into bed with me. I spent those wee dark hours analyzing the storm track maps and reading the weather geek chatter on chat boards. I live-streamed tweets tagged with #tcpam. I repeatedly refreshed the search term “Cyclone Pam Vanuatu” to pull up the most recent news article.

This all kept me well informed, but reading phrases like “the most destructive natural disaster to ever hit Vanuatu” and staring at images like the one below while the worst of the storm raged probably didn’t actually help me that much. All it did was feed my versatile imagination and make me more afraid than I remember being at any single point in Mike’s cancer journey last year.

I should have known better.

Actually, I did know better, and I did it anyway. How often do we do that in life?

You know what has really surprised me about Tropical Ordeal Pam, though? How hard the wait was for me, a watcher.

We first knew a cyclone was brewing nine days before it arrived. We knew it would be bad to catastrophic five days before the event. We didn’t know that the cyclone would score a direct hit on the island until the day of—Pam saved that as a special last minute Friday the 13^th surprise—but we always knew widespread devastation was a possibility.

Mike and I talked by Skype most days last week in the lead-up to this cyclone. For me, they were some of the most difficult Skype conversations we’ve ever had. Even before the cyclone, he was beyond busy getting a handle on his new job as Country Director. He’s in a place I’ve not yet been, working with a team I’ve not yet met.

In my own work, I’ve written and taught about how difficult it can be for couples to connect when one of you is dealing with life and death and the other is dealing with potty training headaches. Mike and I have lived that dissonance before, but never as clearly as during the past ten days. I felt like I didn’t know enough about what was going on over there to even ask intelligent questions, much less offer any helpful input.

It is hard to find the right words—sometimes to find any words—when you are the one sidelined, watching an epic struggle play out.

It is hard to reach for something to say, or ask, and consistently come up with what feels like trivia in the face of the momentous.

It is hard to get off Skype wondering if the time they have just spent talking to you has been more of a drain on their time and energy right now than a blessing.

It is hard when “I love you” feels inadequate and anything else feels like melodrama.

I’ve gone to bed most nights for the past week having to trust that Mike knows all of this. That he can sense my good intentions, and that it really is the thought that counts at the moment, because my words sure haven’t felt like they’ve counted for much of anything.

Words haven’t been totally useless this week, though. After a long night last night of watching the storm in technicolor, the most welcome six words of the week arrived on Dad’s cell phone via text. They read…

“Safe. No power. Winds still howling.”

I texted back straight away.

“So relieved to hear. Reports of houses down in diff parts of Vila. Horrendous. Everyone thinking of you. Love.”

I still don’t know if he got that text—I haven’t heard anything from him since. But for the first time this week, it doesn’t seem to matter.

He is safe for now.

And he probably doesn’t need to see that last word.

I think he knows.

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**While Mike might be safe, there are many in Vanuatu right now who have not been so lucky. No one knows how many people died last night, and early reports are using words like “obliterated” and “nuclear” to describe the impact of this cyclone on the local villages. I’ll be back in coming days to share more about the impact and what agencies and governments are doing to help with recovery.

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