LETTING GO At the end things pass away into a hard won perspective. The sepia photographs of childhood like twilight encounters with eternity and the youthful laughter pealing across a mountainside. Standing close together we make our vows in front of others knowing with a backward kind of courage that everything passes away no matter how precious the memory and that even in this we recognize the flourish and the firm signature of love. Everything we ever held in our hands is given to another or slips like sand through the gate of our fingers into something which to begin with we cannot recognize. Everything we ever held in our hands is given away in marriage to another person or another world. How could we know the blessings which illuminated our days? The joy too strong to feel until it was no longer there to disturb us. We find ourselves always at last ennobled by the encounter the wedding vows remembered at the end and cherished now like a live hand holding a dead hand loving everything it must let go. --from Everything is Waiting for You
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Thank you, David. The endless circle of devotion and love and death and memory. These past years, there is this great presence where past and present continually loop around and meet — Eros reconstructing itself through divine inertia and exalted states of being, of grace. I prophesied, as much in whim, as out of fear, to my wife one day, “If you should die, I will go rest myself against that great red oak along the trail behind our house — and rest for awhile”. And I have ever since.
My husband is diagnosed with AML. This was almost too much for me. Yet I read it again and again.