when Steve and i started this blog, we admitted that we would not only post updates about his medical sides of things but that we might use this as a place to process the larger conversation we were having with each other and in our heads.
So, it seems i am continuing that process. All of my days now seem to be answering to our days together. I journal and all, and I have really good friends to talk things to the end with. However, as our family lives with this daily synthesizing of the way of life that Steve was so sure of and preached about, merging with our day to day without his body near, I find that this blog is cathartic.
My friend Bonnie wrote me a while back, sending quotes from Hannah Coulter and ending her letter with these words: "So I pray for you to cup, to hold each other, and to be filled with God's presence. You would be smothered with beauty in the midst of grief."
and from Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter -
"A sort of heartbreaking kindness grew then between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. It grew among all of us. It was a kindness of doing whatever we could think of that might help or comfort one another....That kindness kept us alive."
and
"Love held us. Kindness held us. We were suffering what we were living by."
Bonnie's notes are housed in beautiful artwork, thoughtful choice of stamp, a clipping or a drawing, often of wheat. One time she made the envelope out of a magazine article about fiddleheads, just because she knew I loved them. She addresses them to "Melanie Malone." Sometimes she admits that she wrote the letter months ago but forgot to mail it then so is adding more now and whisking it into the out box lest it lie there hidden for another few months.
Simple attention and kindness that i find in my mailbox periodically.
Daily bread.
Manna.
But I am growing confident that this kind of kindness dripping in the pool of suffering must magically turn the cup of bitterness into joy, for moments, for hours, sometimes even whole days at a time.
And those are the reliefs that we live by.