Let’s touch them, you said. Of the disposable––the lonely, too.
Never eat a single mouthful, your mother told you, unless you share it.
When asked for beliefs, you disappointed. Only here, only this.
It’s not that you hadn’t sought more. It’s not that you hadn’t gazed into the heavens with an aching heart, waiting for some response. Finding nothing only made the ache worse, so you turned what you had of longing to those who mirrored it, to offer the comfort you would seek.
I remember the time. It was a year of massacre, mass suicide, mass extinction. The machine won the chess game. I was finding Joan Didion, the epigraph from Yeats framing her chronicle of the end of an era of wild hope. For? The promise of a new age, Turning and turning, some human achievement promised, but the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
It wasn’t going to work, was it? Meaning, any of the ideas.
You were done with ideas, too. Only love, you offered. Only this.
Unbreak my heart, we sang, our fragile candles in the wind. We were building a mystery, but it seemed to be swallowing us whole, like Jonah’s whale, the secret gardens of our imagined inheritance forever a million miles away.
No, you insisted. Only here. You held what was before you in your hands, giving of your heart until it was done.
And wasn’t this the ultimate hope, some finite relief to our dreams of immortality? That there was something we could do, really do––not dream, not imagine, not vision our way into or out of–– with all its messy, mundane details, its fluid and its stink, its inevitable decay, and the inevitable rejuvenation of this endless, wanting need? We could meet it just as endlessly until we couldn’t anymore, until we could be relieved of the pressure of our promise, swallowed back into the great void you saw everywhere, especially when you sought an answer or a cosmic face toward which to offer your prayers. Only here, you said. Only these outstretched hands.
We could meet them, again and again. This you can do, you showed us. This you can do until you are done.
This morning, I am reminded that on this day, in 1997, Mother Teresa died, so I am considering the legacy of her life.
