This morning, a little before 8, my phone rang.
It was Don, who should have been back from the gym a half hour before. He told me the workout was great, but the drive home had been interrupted by a collision with a deer. “I mean, it’s drivable,” he said. “But the front end’s kind of gone.”
When he arrived back at the house, I expected angst about insurance companies or a blow-by-blow of the accident. I got neither. Donald Patrick had spent his roadside time saying a prayer for the soul of the deer and then being suddenly taken by the sunrise, which was coming up over an ocean of fog. Apparently, he’d wandered into a field and begun snapping photographs. It was those, not the damage, that he wanted to show me.
As I was walking today, pondering what to write this evening, it occurred to me that that delicate tension he held — between mourning forsister deer, attention to the grim necessities of insurance, and joy at a creation that overcame him with its beauty — is something to strive for and something also to recognize when we get it right.
I think my family is getting it right. It was one thing to watch our father’s slow journey into the darkness of Alzheimer’s; it is another thing altogether to watch our mother traveling the same path.
We visit; we gather for Christmas; we make sure there are presents under the tree; and when she’s frightened at night, we take the phone calls, talking her gently off the ledge of confusion and doubt that beckons at sundown. The next day, she remembers none of it. The last time I was home I showed her a picture of her and dad forty years ago. “Who’s that man with me?” she asked.
Every time this happens it re-teaches me the lesson I thought I’d learned with Dad: We do not get to keep anything in this life, not even our memories. And we do not learn to love anyone in this life until we have learned to love their essence, what I might call their soul. This soul, this essence is not contained in wit, political stances, theological convictions, or athletic prowess; neither does it reside in their kindness or patience or self control. The soul that you are loving, or learning to love, is what remains after all the masks its worn in life have worn way.
There is a tension in this kind of love. The whole thing is so horribly sad it brings you up short sometimes in the incipient paralysis of mourning.
And there are the realities that must be attended to: caregivers, bills, trips to the hospital, and those late night phone calls.
But also, sometimes, your mother laughs just the way she used to. Sometimes she tells a joke. Sometimes, you are overcome by the beauty of the sun rising through a sea of the thickest fog. Sometimes you wander into the field to get a better look and realize that you are gazing at your own soul, which, standing there on the tenderest edges of all these things, is learning, in earnest, how to love.
I am grateful this evening for my siblings who hold that tension with me. And I am grateful for a husband who prays for the soul of a deer. Though we fumble, often, I am grateful that sometimes we get it right.
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