The severe gift

Perhaps it is because I stood peering last Friday afternoon from an outside window into the darkened front room of the food pantry in which he volunteered for nearly the last twenty-five years of his life and was unexpectedly a bit overcome by a flash of memory which transported me back to a time when he was not sick, was not dead, but well and alive, standing by my side helping me arrange canned foods onto meticulously ordered shelves; perhaps it is because my black Doc Marten shoes purchased for $2.99 at the Salvation Army located on Central and Diversey are almost an embarrassment to wear (but really I have no shame) because they are in desperate need of polishing and that was yet another act of selfless giving that he did for me; or perhaps is is because this evening my mother pulled out of her back seat four of his jackets which are now deposited onto the backs of my dining room chairs and in my solitary state while children slept and a husband read, I buried my nose deep within the folds of blue nylon and though rationalizing that my mother surely laundered the coat prior to its journey into my home, I swore, I swear, that I can smell his scent six months later, but my heart feels so raw these last few days, my eyes so filled with tears.

-an excerpt from "Rising"

Wendell Berry, The Wheel

5.

Any man's death could end the story:

his mourners, having accompanied him

to the grave through all he knew,

turn back, leaving him complete.

But this is not the story of a life.

It is the story of lives, knit together,

overlapping in succession, rising

again from grave after grave.

For those who depart from it, bearing it

in their minds, the grave is a beginning.

It has weighted the earth with sudden

new gravity, the enrichment of pain.

There is a grave, too, in each 

survivor. By it, the dead one lives.

He enters us, a broken blade,

sharp, clear as a lens or a mirror.

And he comes into us helpless, tender

as the newborn enter the world. Great

is the burden of our care. We must be true

to ourselves. How else will he know us?

Like a wound, grief receives him.

Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep

as part of ourselves the severe gift.

By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligence of life.

Where the tree falls the forest rises.

There is nowhere to stand but in absence,

no life but in the fateful light.

6.

Ended, a story is history;

it is in time, with time

lost. But if a man's life

continue in another man,

then the flesh will rhyme

its part in immortal song.

By absence, he comes again,

There is a kinship of the fields

that gives to the living the breath

of the dead. The earth

opened in the spring, opens

in all springs. Nameless,

ancient, many-lived, we reach

through ages with the seed.