What Has Changed
May 23, 2026
Cast your bread upon the waters,
For there you will find it after many days. - Ecc 11:1Remembering is a strange activity of mankind. The movements and rhythms of life are endless - and only accelerate it seems - and yet we are creatures always aware of our distance from other points in life. Childhood and its scars and joys stay attached to us like some long, invisible cable winding through the labyrinth of living. How interesting is it that we still see ourselves many days as the same teenager who sought validation and confidence? How intriguing that we struggle to shake such feelings when the people of our everyday life have no awareness of the same thing? But we remember ourselves. We remember with such strength and focus that we draw the past into our own present.
And at other times, the very act of remembering causes us to realize how far we are from where we were. It is like casting the line far into the current and feeling the hum of the reel carry out the distance on and on - sometimes the very casting itself giving a sucking feeling in your stomach. Has it really been that long? Have I really not thought of these things for years? Or worse yet - have I really forgotten so much of how things were, and who I was, and where I have come from?
Remembering then becomes a sort of exercise in spatial awareness. We know where we are in time and space by measuring the distances of our lives from other points in our life. But we do indeed forget. And we forget much. It is the byproduct of a passage through time. We live, and as such we forget things. What do we do with such a realization - that the substance of our life changes, and that change means that we forget? Time does not seem to be an ally. Life itself does not seem kind in this regard. We lose things, and those things are lost from us by the very nature of our living. To be breathing is to be losing what was for what is. And so often that which is really is the stuff we dreaded most. Here we arrive, at all the fears become real.
What does a person do with such a realization of the cost of living - the cost of change?
As Lauren Hannah’s health deteriorated in those weeks of May 2024, the pain across her body became prolific. It clouded her ability to focus on anything, and she knew this and spoke of it. It became infuriatingly difficult to consider anything at all besides the pain itself. Like an invisible vine that had filled every corner of her house. In due course there was no normal pain medication that could cover such blazing hurt - her liver was covered in cancer lesions such that it had become twice its normal size - and so, for the sake of some relief, narcotics were introduced to her medication list.
A week before Lauren would end up in the ICU on her last day, these narcotics began doing strange things to her mind, as you might expect. Lauren started disappearing from herself. She wasn’t sure where she was, or what things were. She couldn’t locate the place to drink on a cup, or couldn’t formulate a thought in a way that made coherent sense.
But most heartbreaking was that she started not knowing who people were. She was as delightful and peaceful and loving as ever, but she simply could not find the names or reference points for people she had known all her life. It was, truly, gut-wrenching.
Stay with it, though. This is not about the sadness of the thing.
To watch someone you love deeply disappear from view, even as they are still present, is devastating, but it was not all that it seemed. On the worst of these days, when Lauren seemed to truly no longer be there, the most gnawing questions finally had to come out. She was wrapped in a blanket, quietly sitting on the couch resting against the cushions with her feet drawn up, half sitting to keep the pressure off her abdomen. She woke up and looked very directly at the questions.
“La, do you know who that is?” pointing towards a family member in the kitchen.
“Hm. No…no I don’t think I do,” she said very softly but confidently. She would use the same kind of gentle voice the whole last day of her life, and you could almost hold the palpability of her kindness.
“Ok. What about here. Do you know where you are right now?”
“Oh,” she paused for a while and you could see her head running for answers it did not have. “No, no I don’t think so.”
“That’s ok. It’s all ok.
Do you know who your husband is, La?”
And this is where the story gets good.
Lauren laughed. Out loud and quietly. And she was laughing at the silliness of such a question. As if you had asked her if there was a sun, or if water was wet.
She reached out her hand and touched the face in front of her.
“Of course I do. It’s the person I love.”
“Ok. One more, sweet girl. Do you know who your daughter is?”
Lauren laughed again. She leaned back against the couch cushion and closed her eyes, like she knew herself and her place in the world so well that she did not need to fight to inhabit that place. She could simply be there.
“Of course I do,” she said again with her eyes closed still. “It’s Trinity Wyn.”
And she knew as well as anyone that no more questions needed to be asked. Even not knowing most of where she was, or who she was, or what things were, she knew that she knew enough. She was not afraid to have forgotten things, because those things were bound to be forgotten. Or remembered again, if in their due course.
She would indeed come out of that narcotic fog the days before her death, and she knew everyone who came to her by name. She sang with her nieces on her last day. She spoke to her sisters. She kissed her daughter. She talked with doctors. She laughed with nurses.
We forget because we change. And we change because we are creatures filled with living and losing and growing older and growing farther from where we were. And in many ways this is hard. We are not good with the ending of things. Do any of us say goodbye knowing that it might actually be the last time we see a friend - are we not the kind of people that would instead say see you next time? No, change is as heavy as it is inevitable. Even if we are trapped in the same place, we ourselves are changed in the being trapped. How strange a thing is this? Even if you were to fight change tooth and claw, the very fistfuls of your life that you grip would be the catalyst for change in your soul. We know this instinctively, because we see it in the bitter and broken who have become so by trying to not change - in their very attempts to remain the same they have initiated a worse kind of change.
Refusing change is refusing, if we are honest, life itself. If you are to breathe, you are bound to become something you were not before. Everything around you will bloom, and die, and bloom again. And so change comes with a sort of question attached to those who have suffered -which is to say, all of us: is there something to be gained in the change, or is it all a loss?
If there is, then such a thing requires something of you. Mainly, you must be willing to let go of what was, so that it might become something that has yet to be. You must give up those days of your life that hold the pain you cannot make sense of, so that you might see the whole thing woven. The changing - the forgetting and the remembering and the orientation of your whole person around such things - is exactly the point. It is in that change that you will find the answers of the thing, because it is in such change that living is done. And the tapestry is not woven by studying tapestry, but by actually weaving. You must live if you are to understand what living is for. You must give away the days as they go. In fact this is essential.
You must be willing to actually let go of those days, because you cannot cling to what was and expect to be able to simultaneously hold today. You are incapable of being in two places at once.
Such a claim, though, is built on a real wager. To say that the answers are found in the living of life - in all the changes of living - would require one to believe that, well, such a thing could be true. And the longer your pain has carried on, the harder it is to believe such a thing. You mean to tell me that my decades of hardship could be resolved by more of the same thing? There is a chasm here, and it is the distance between the turmoil of your life (and there is much turmoil), and the proof that such turmoil was not wasted.
This distance is as real as it is wide and impossible to cross. So is it possible to think that such a gap could be closed? Is it possible to actually believe that the frayed ends of your life will be woven together in such a way that you could call that thing beautiful?
This is the wager on the table. This is the bet at hand when you cannot make sense of your life - the shattered homes, and the crumbled relationships, and the cancer diagnoses.
Whatever one might come to, what cannot be denied is that if such meaning and full-bloomed significance were possible for pain, it would be the most beautiful outcome possible. It would not be enough to be given some monolithic logical conclusion to your pain - to be told that your tears have been used for reasons one, two, and three. That would be something, but it would not be full. But to see that the whole of your life - no really, all of it in its motley disorder - was of value for a thousand different lives and people - would that not be the most satisfying view of all?
In her dying, Lauren gave us a view of how to run this wager. She believed that her pain was not wasted, and neither was her death. She believed in her bones that all that she had lost was worth what she would stand to gain - a dying that undoubtedly left loose ends, but loose ends which would not be lost. She believed they would be used in the changing that came with her death, and such changing was not just decent, but actually good.
She walked into that change at peace with it, and did so by refusing to believe that she needed to understand it. Perhaps this is the hardest and yet most empowering part: to be able to let go of what you cannot make sense of. Will you forget things as you change? Of course. But does that mean such change is for the worse? Lauren would have you believe not. She would have you find hands that are able to return all that is lost a hundred-fold, with more life than you could think imaginable. It is in those arms that she chose to place her life, and it is there that she chose to place her death.
Kanaan, we continue to pray for you. Thank you for this good post. God be with you.
Beautiful and edifying- thank you for writing this piece of thankfulness and love and trust.