Saved by Work

Elizabeth and I met in 2018 in Louisville, Kentucky, where we gathered for our creative writing program’s spring residency. Having been first introduced virtually by a mutual friend and then by reading pages of each other’s writing in preparation for our workshop, we became fast friends once we connected in person. 

Elizabeth was an Episcopal priest, serving a church in Virginia but originally from the deserts of Arizona. I was a middle school teacher from Michigan. Her dad grew oranges, mine apples. 

We began most of our days during the residency walking and talking together. After residency we continued to meet up each morning, but by email, checking in on each other’s writing and everyday lives. The next spring, in 2019, we spent another ten days together. Had you told me then it would be the last time I would see her in person, I would have scoffed.

But our 2020 and 2021 writer’s residencies were held virtually, thanks to the pandemic. Our daily emails continued as we both graduated from the program and saw each other through finding agents, getting book deals, and the ups and downs of becoming published writers together. In the midst of this came her first and then second cancer diagnosis. Each face-to-face reunion we planned fell through for one reason or another. 

Last week, Elizabeth died. 

My last email came from her two days before her last breath. I knew things were dire when I woke up the next day and didn’t see her name in my inbox. 

Part of me regrets not finding a way to jump on a plane to see her one last time. Part of me regrets my denial or lack of awareness of how little time she had left, that we just went on sending messages, never acknowledging, especially in the last days, how close we were to the end. Another part of me finds it fitting that we just went right on sharing our daily messages without understanding of what was to come. It was our words, our daily check-ins, the everyday-ness and steadfastness of our relationship that bound us. 

In a newsletter last November she wrote, “I still check in every morning with my ‘writing soulmate’ Dana, whom I haven’t seen in person for more than three years, yet we are extremely close.” She called our check-ins a spiritual practice.

In an email that same month, between details about our work days, her doctor’s appointments, and the eagle perched in the tree near her window, I wrote, “Sometimes I can’t breathe when I think about what it would be like if I didn’t have an email from you in my inbox every morning.” Her response was simple: “I teared up about the not breathing part. Thanks for that.”

In one of our final exchanges, Elizabeth wrote from the hospital. In a little over a week, she went from delivering a sermon from her wheelchair to setting up a meeting with hospice. Her hope was to go home, sit in her favorite Heron chair, and work on her writing. She was waiting on her publisher to send back edits on the memoir she had written and was beginning a book on her beloved biblical hero, John the Baptist, whom she lovingly referred to as JBap. “It’s a relief to maybe be done with all the doctor’s appointments and stuff,” she wrote to me. She hoped her final days might be a “quiet life.”

While I wholeheartedly believe we are saved by grace, not by works, when I think of Elizabeth, I understand the ways our work can save us. Not in an I-earned-it or I-need-to-prove-it kind of way, but in the way that passion and calling and pursuit of God’s calling can sustain us.

At first, Elizabeth (who was told by her oncologist that breast cancer saved her by detecting her lung cancer, for which she had no risk factors) struggled with warrior language for cancer, but later embraced it. 

In an early draft of her forthcoming memoir, she wrote, “I wanted to be a faithful warrior. I wasn’t quite ready to rest, though. I wanted more baptisms. I wanted to stay in that worship space with those people, and people I hadn’t met yet, for years.”

Elizabeth loved being a priest. She loved being a writer. And while she’d be quick to remind us that she also loved long naps and reality TV, her work motivated her. It sustained her. It was an act of worship. She hated stepping down as rector of her church earlier this spring, and her last messages were about her work, how badly she wanted it shared, how badly she wanted her words out in the world. 

I am the daughter of farmers who often consider sitting down to be giving up. I am well-acquainted with the tenets of a “good Calvinist work ethic,” and I have struggled throughout my life with boundaries, rest, and when to say no. I am a very bad napper, usually waking with a racing heart, panicking about what I’ve missed or not accomplished. 

Elizabeth was none of this. She scoffed at my too-busy schedule. She endorsed slowing down and doing less. She would tell me to lounge around more and to stop feeling guilty about saying no. But she deeply believed in her work; she believed in mine. She understood in a fundamental way that she didn’t need to earn any favor (with God or anyone else) and yet her work drove her to fight, to persevere, to live. In many ways, her passion and drive extended her life. She had things to say and was not giving in—she was stubbornly faithful til the very end. 

My inbox feels incredibly empty each morning since she died. I wake up to find her words, and they are missing. I miss her daily updates, her snarky tone, her descriptions of the sweet treat in her kitchen she was trying not to devour, and always the question she signed off with: “What are you doing today?”

It’s that question that lingers: What am I doing today? I hope I’m working like Elizabeth, like someone who has things to do, not because I have to, but because God calls me to them and I get to accept that call fervently, with urgency and faithfulness. And then, like she’d advocate, maybe I should cancel some plans and take a nap.

God, I miss her. 

P.S. I can’t say all these things without recommending Elizabeth’s books. One I reviewed here on the RJ: Unexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Women without Children. The other, co-authored with Samantha Vincent-Alexander and just published in July, is Irreverent Prayers: Talking to God When You’re Seriously Sick. I hope you’ll check them both out.

Header photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash