Gus needed an MRI when he was four months old.
(Spoiler: he’s fine, everything turned out fine.)
Our options were to either inject him with radioactive dye for imaging or do an MRI without anesthesia. As great as it sounded to turn our son into a human glow stick, we opted for the MRI. The doctors told us to give him a bunch of milk and he’d probably sleep right through it.
Sometimes doctors have to lie to get you to do stuff, I guess.
They stuck him with both an IV and catheter, wrapped him in an inflatable tube like a miserable burrito, and placed him face-down inside the machine. If you’ve never been in an MRI, imagine the loudest, most jarring noises a machine can make, like the world’s most effective alarm clock.
The moment it started, Gus screamed.
Not crying. Screaming. Primal terror condensed into one continuous wail.
They gave me a button to press “if anything went wrong.” Since he wasn’t hooked up to vitals and I could only reach his foot, my job was to feel for his pulse through his ankle and I guess press the button if his heart stopped beating?
My mind spiraled.
Why didn’t they tell us it would be like this? Why didn’t we wait? This is torture. My poor little guy.
I tried singing a song I made up called “The Bouncing Train” loudly enough for him to hear me over the explosive BEEP BOOP BRRR and through his tiny ear plugs. Turns out it’s hard to sing loudly, sound calm, and cry all at the same time.
And then something cracked open.
I just stopped fighting. Stopped wrestling with reality. I gave up.
I turned toward… I don’t know what to call it. God. The universe. Love. Something that’s both out there and in here and bigger than me. And I quietly said, please help.
I remember feeling something flowing from my heart, through my hand and into his foot.
It felt like transferring a message to him, that he was safe. That he wasn’t alone. That we were going to make it through.
Gus didn’t calm down right away, but eventually he did fall asleep. Probably from exhaustion more than anything else.
I started crying then, but differently. It felt like a blanket had been placed over both of us. Like something was holding us, even though nothing on the outside had changed.
This winter has been heavy.
The day of the big snowstorm, one of our alpacas died.
A few days later, my mom’s test results came back, and she’ll need to go through chemo for the third time.
Forgive me if this is too on the nose, but lately the whole world feels like a giant snowstorm. Not just the literal one outside, but the way winter has been coming at us this year. The cold, the darkness, friends struggling, the sense that society is collapsing beyond my front door. Slow, steady piling up.
And then it comes in gusts. Icy wind that knocks you sideways when you’re already struggling to stay upright. News that hits hard and leaves you face-down in the snow.
And while you’re trying to find the strength to fight through it and dig yourself out, more snow keeps falling, and before long you’re buried.
When things get this way, surrender sounds like a terrible idea. Like giving up. Like lying down in the snow and freezing.
But I’m realizing now that surrender isn’t passive, quitting, or inaction.
My first big surrender experience was sixteen years ago, when I finally hit bottom with drinking. What I had to give up then wasn’t alcohol so much as the fight. The belief that I could do it alone. The idea that if I just tried harder, white-knuckled longer, or hated myself more effectively, I’d eventually get free.
Surrender didn’t mean I stopped doing things. It meant I stopped doing them alone, and stopped disagreeing with what is.
It opened the door to honesty, to vulnerability, to letting other people help hold me up. That wasn’t passivity. It was the only thing that worked.
The MRI felt like a quieter version of the same pattern.
I didn’t consciously decide to surrender at that moment. I just stopped resisting. And in that stopping, something changed internally, even though nothing changed on the outside.
Whether it had any real impact on Gus I’ll never know, but it helped me stay. It helped me not panic. It helped me not press the button and start the whole ordeal over again. It allowed me to be present instead of collapsing inward.
That’s what surrender has looked like for me, again and again. Not quitting. Not checking out. But giving up the fight with reality so I can see the truth and receive help.
This winter has asked for that kind of surrender more than once.
In this season of weight, what has made the difference hasn’t been toughness or control, but the recognition that I don’t have to grapple with it in my head, all by myself.
Surrender by itself doesn’t change the conditions.
But it makes it possible to breathe inside them, to accept them as they are, and to reconnect to a greater whole that can carry us through them.
And sometimes, that’s enough to get through a long, cold night.
Talk soon,
Corey
