For Ang, With Love
“If I ask you, angel, will you come and lead
This ache to speech, or carry me like a child,
To Riot?”
-Edgar Bowers from Autumn Shade
I sat by your bed and helped you eat a popsicle, the most childish of things, while I asked you the most adult-ish of things- how is your heart?
At first, the contrast struck me. But then I remembered: “For the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” And it did not feel incongruent at all.
Tending to the simplest human need, nourishment for the body, while also reaching for something deeper: the part of us that endures beyond the body when we know we must bury it….what we deepest crave, we crave from the time we enter this world, not with a laugh or even with silent acceptance but with an inconsolable cry. I want life! But it hurts! But there must be more!
So much of my grieving for you, I realize, is grieving for this life, which is at once a gift and a sorrow. Because most of my tears have not been for what we were. Most of them have been for what has become, what is, and some for what could have been. I wonder aloud and with pain, if we knew how this ended (and we do… we all know how it will eventually end), could we not have changed some of it. I wonder at the things that this world, the devil, and yes, even our own flesh steals from us.
I grieve for my own life, all our lives, which learns as it looks back instead of as it looks ahead. I said this to a good friend, who, wanting to comfort me said that it does no good to think about these things, but I replied that it does me very good to give voice to my regrets… to make a song of them… so that I can carry them with me, teaching me strength… instead of using all of my strength to divorce myself of them…so that they change me… or else it feels wasted. empty. senseless.
I grieve that we so often must extract wisdom from pain that sometimes brilliant poets cannot tell the difference (“Pain comes from darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain”- Randall Jarrell). I grieve for what we must lean only on the divine for- the wound of our emptiness; our balm for explaining what our souls cannot quite make into the syllables that are recognizable when they come out of our mouths. Like the word that you said to me when I asked the adult question: Forgiven. It didn’t sound like a verb; it sounded like a noun. Forgiven, when you said it, sounded like a place.
The place, the only place, in fact, where God abides with us.
And I know, friend, I know, that most of my life’s work seems like teaching myself and others how not to need forgiveness… which most days sounds good and noble, but in moments like these feels like, at worst, an ash heap, or at best, a slippery handle to hold onto. When we all have to stand in the room and no longer fight death but accept it, we need a lot more than a character-building story. We need a divine grace that lets one of us know we are forgiven so can have peace in this moment and lets the rest of us know that because you are forgiven, we can have peace in the moments to come.
When you went to sleep, you slept like I have only seen two people sleeping in my life: once 20 years ago and once 2 and a half. So, by a muscle memory built on something that only happened twice, but a memory that made its mark on my own cells in a way that I would forget, I bent over you and cried to God to do something for you that I could not do. And I know, I know, friend, that it is mostly selfish- just like the prior two times, because as much as I needed you to be ok, I also desperately needed to know that you would be ok. I can only live in my world, with myself, if I can at least do it knowing you will be ok.
(Each year harder to live within
Each year harder to live without
-Craig Arnold)
I think of this love and that maybe it is selfish, but maybe it is not. Maybe most needing to know that you will be ok is my basest craving- my basest and most urgent craving. One that screams like a newborn-
I will let you go and still live in the world, but I will hate it too. I will suffer as long as your suffering can be ended. I will do the thing we most do not want to do which is to put your body into the ground, if we don’t also have to put your soul there.
I will look at your oldest daughter and see how she has the best of both you and her dad in her and yet somehow something that can only be the best of God. [I wish I knew how to describe this to her. I kept trying but the only thing that would come out were stories of our good times on Cedar Springs and the Lake… and the Bible study with your mom that I only attended twice but changed so many of our lives].
Finally, (and I grieve that it feels so final even though faith says it is not), I know this about Grace. About Forgiveness. God can do with it in one moment, what I could not do in a lifetime of words. I pray He did it. I pray it even now- because I can’t quite comprehend whether our prayers which are eternal are also governed by time, for one, but also because I can’t quite help not telling my Father what I most desire.
And I do not pray this part, because I cannot imagine how foolish these words would sound were they to make it into eternity- I hope it, though. I hope that you will find Alex and tell him about all the fishing you did. Tell him about your cat named Zebco. I don’t think I ever told him. He will like that story the best... And maybe the one about me helping you milk the goat with mastitis because I felt so bad for it, having just recovered from the same affliction.
I love you, Ang. See you soon.