The elevator didn’t just stop; it sighed. A heavy, mechanical expiration that left me dangling between the 12th and 22nd floors for exactly 22 minutes. There is a specific kind of silence that exists in a stuck elevator. It isn’t empty. It’s thick, smelling of burnt grease and the faint, citrusy ghost of someone else’s perfume from three hours ago. My heart hammered 92 times a minute against my ribs, a trapped bird in a cage that was itself trapped in a concrete throat. I pressed the alarm button 12 times, the little bell ringing out into a shaft that didn’t care. It’s funny how quickly the veneer of being a ‘functioning adult’ peels off when you realize your entire reality is currently a four-by-four metal box that refuses to acknowledge your schedule.

This physical confinement, this sudden, unconsented pause, is the only way I can think to describe the state Lily B.K. works with every single day. Lily is a grief counselor with 32 years of experience and a bone-deep disdain for the word ‘closure.’ I met her for coffee a few weeks ago-well before my vertical imprisonment-and she told me that the greatest lie we tell the suffering is that there is an exit.

I’m sitting here on the floor of this elevator now, my back against the cold steel, thinking about her 22nd rule: Never apologize for the mess. But life isn’t a hospital wing; it’s a living, breathing, decaying ecosystem. When I got stuck, my first instinct was to fight the air. I felt like I was suffocating, not because the oxygen was low, but because I couldn’t control the space. I wanted to ‘resolve’ the situation. I wanted an immediate answer. But there are no answers at 102 feet above the lobby when the motor has seized.

Lily B.K. often deals with clients who are frustrated by their own persistence. They come to her after 12 months or 52 weeks or 202 days, asking why they still feel the weight. They feel like they’ve failed at being happy. They think they should have ‘cleaned up’ the wreckage by now. But Lily’s contrarian angle is that the wreckage is actually the new foundation. You don’t clear the rubble of a fallen building to build the exact same building again; you use the stones that are left to build something lower to the ground, something more earthquake-proof. She once told a man who had lost his daughter in 1992 that his sadness wasn’t a mess to be mopped up. It was a cathedral he had built to house her memory. You don’t mop a cathedral.

And yet, we struggle with the maintenance of it all. There is a strange, uncomfortable irony in my current situation. I am sitting in a space that is technically cleaned every night, yet I feel the crushing weight of every person who has ever stood here. We try to outsource our discomfort. We hire people to handle the things we don’t want to look at. In our homes, we might call the Norfolk Cleaning Group to ensure the windows are clear and the floors are polished, seeking a sense of external order that we hope will mirror our internal state. But while a team can come in and scrub the physical soot from a chimney or the grime from a baseboard, the internal soot of a life lived through loss requires a different kind of upkeep. It requires the kind of attention Lily B.K. provides: not a scrubbing away, but a witnessing.

I think about the 82 percent of people Lily says try to rush their own mourning. They see their grief as a technical glitch, a mechanical failure like this elevator. They want to call a technician, get a spare part, and get moving again. They view their sadness as an inefficiency. But what if the ‘stuckness’ is where the actual life happens? In these 22 minutes of being suspended in the dark, I have noticed more about the texture of my own breath and the structural integrity of my shoes than I have in the last 202 days of rushing to meetings. I’ve had to confront the fact that I am not in charge. The elevator is in charge. Gravity is in charge.

I’m rambling. The air in here is getting warm. I can hear the muffled shouts of the firefighters on the 22nd floor. They’re coming to ‘save’ me. But even when they pry these doors open and I step back out into the lobby, I won’t be the same person who stepped in. I’ll be the person who knows what it feels like to be suspended in the void. I’ll be the person who counted 72 flickers of a dying fluorescent bulb. We think we want to return to who we were, but that person is gone. The person who didn’t know the elevator could break is dead. The new person is the one who carries the knowledge of the break.

Lily B.K. would say that my frustration with this elevator is the same as my frustration with my own mind. I want it to be a smooth ride. I want the floors to pass by in a predictable sequence: 1, 2, 3, 4. I don’t want the sudden jolt, the 52-second drop in heart rate, the realization that the cables are frayed. But the fraying is the truth. Everything is fraying, all the time. Our bodies, our relationships, our buildings. We spend so much energy pretending things are solid that when they finally reveal their fragility, we act like it’s a moral failing. We apologize for being ‘unstable.’ We say ‘sorry for the breakdown.’ Why? A breakdown is just the reality finally catching up with the facade.

There’s a metallic clang. The car shakes. I think they’re resetting the power. If the lights come back on, I’ll have to go back to being a person with a to-do list. I’ll have to explain why I was late for the 2:22 PM meeting. I’ll have to ‘get back to work.’ But part of me wants to stay here. In this 22-minute vacuum, the world’s expectations didn’t apply. I wasn’t a writer, or a consumer, or a citizen. I was just a body in a box. There is a strange peace in being completely beyond help. When you are truly stuck, you can finally stop trying to move. You can just be. Lily B.K.’s clients often find this same relief in the depths of their worst moments. When the worst thing has already happened, you don’t have to worry about the worst thing happening anymore. The anxiety of ‘what if’ is replaced by the heavy, solid reality of ‘what is.’

We need to stop treating our lives as problems to be solved. We aren’t math equations. We are stories that don’t always have a coherent ending. We are a collection of 52-year-old mistakes and 12-year-old dreams, all tangled up in a present that is constantly slipping away. If you’re waiting for the day when everything is ‘fixed,’ when the grief is gone and the house is clean and the elevator never stops, you’re waiting for a life that doesn’t exist. The real life is the one where you’re dangling in the dark, smelling the ozone, and realizing that you’re still breathing.

The Knowledge of the Break

I hear the doors groan. A sliver of light from the 12th floor breaks the darkness. It’s blinding. I stand up, my knees shaking, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. As I step out, a firefighter looks at me and asks if I’m okay. I want to tell him about Lily B.K. and the 402 cathedrals of grief. I want to tell him that I’m not ‘okay’ in the way he means, but I am ‘okay’ in a way that is much more terrifying. Instead, I just nod. I walk toward the stairs. I don’t think I’ll be taking the elevator for a while, but then again, I might. Because now I know that even if it stops, the world doesn’t end. It just pauses. And in that pause, if you’re quiet enough, you can hear the heart of the machine still beating, even when it’s broken. Is it enough to just be the witness to your own falling? Or do we always have to reach for the floor?