The Chapters That Arrive Without Warning

I got an email from my son's school this week.

Routine, on the surface. A reminder to be aware of the symptoms of meningitis, following cases in the area. The kind of message schools send. The kind you read quickly and file away.

Except I didn't file it away.

For just a moment, a few seconds, no more, something shifted. A feeling I recognised before I could name it. A low hum of collective unease, the sense of something moving beneath the ordinary surface of an ordinary day. The world carrying on as normal while something else was quietly beginning.

I've felt that before.

It was March 2020. I was in my car, listening to the radio, when the announcement came.

I pulled over.

I'm not entirely sure why. The car was still running. I just couldn't keep driving. I sat there on the side of the road and I cried, not dramatically, not for long, but properly. The kind of crying that comes when something too large to process arrives all at once and the body deals with it before the mind catches up.

What I was crying about, I think, was the not knowing. We were stepping into something none of us had a map for. The chapter was changing and nobody had asked permission.

I was a funeral director and Celebrant at the time. I dealt with death for a living. I was, in the language that would emerge over the following weeks, a frontline worker. I had sat with more grief than most people encounter in a lifetime.

And I was undone by a radio announcement on a Monday evening.

The other thing I knew, sitting there on the side of that road, was that I wasn't going to see her. The woman I loved. But she was the person I wanted to be with, and the world had just decided that wasn't possible for a while. Nobody asked about that either.

I started the car again eventually. What else do you do.

The next morning I drove the M4. Thirty miles and not a single car on my side of the road.

I want to be honest with you here: I may have put my foot down more than usual. 

There was something almost surreal about that drive, the empty tarmac stretching out ahead, the sky enormous, the world paused. Like being inside an apocalypse film, except the apocalypse was real and somewhere behind me people were panic buying toilet rolls.

I've thought about that drive a lot since. The strange lightness of it. The way the plot twist had, in one of its first hours, handed me something unexpectedly beautiful, thirty miles of open road and nobody to answer to but the speedometer.

That's not a metaphor. It's just what happened. But it stayed with me.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He lost his wife, his parents, his brother. He arrived at the camps with a manuscript he had spent years writing, it was taken from him immediately.

What he discovered in that extremity, and spent the rest of his life writing about, is this: everything can be taken from a person except one thing. The last of human freedoms. The freedom to choose your response to any given set of circumstances.

Between what happens to you and how you react to it, there is a space. And in that space, however small, however briefly available, lives something that belongs entirely to you.

He wasn't talking about silver linings. He wasn't suggesting that suffering is secretly a gift, or that everything happens for a reason, or that the plot twist was really an opportunity in disguise. He'd seen too much for that kind of comfort.

He was saying something harder and more honest than that.

It's not about finding the silver lining. It's about deciding who you are in the face of something you cannot change.

The meningitis outbreak in Kent is not Covid. Two young people have died. Families are living through something acute and devastating right now, and our thoughts are genuinely with them, with the students, the parents, the community in Canterbury trying to make sense of something that arrived without warning and took everything.

I don't want to reach past that grief to make a point.

But the feeling that school email briefly gave me, that low tremor of recognition, reminded me that plot twists don't announce themselves in advance. They don't wait for a convenient moment. They don't care about your plans, your relationships, your work, the version of your life you had in mind for this particular chapter.

They just arrive. Via a radio announcement, or a school email, or a phone call you weren't expecting, or a diagnosis delivered in a room that suddenly feels very small.

And then you are in it. In the chapter you didn't choose, with no map, and no certainty about how long it lasts or what comes after.

Here's what I know from sitting with families after someone has died, from helping people find words for lives that have ended, often too soon, often without warning.

The people who seem most fully themselves, the ones whose lives feel coherent even in the telling of them, are not the ones who avoided the uninvited chapters. Nobody avoids them. They're the ones who found something in those chapters worth carrying forward. Not a lesson, necessarily. Not a silver lining. Just something. A clarity about what mattered. A relationship deepened by difficulty. A version of themselves they didn't know existed until the ordinary scaffolding was taken away.

Frankl called it meaning-making. I think of it as authorship.

You didn't write the plot twist. But the next chapter is still yours.