Archive for the ‘Grief’ Category
What the Day Allows
Matthew 6:34 NRSV “Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
By then, days were no longer measured by intention.
They were measured by allowance.
What could be done without consequence. What would cost too much. What needed to wait. The body made these decisions before the mind could argue with them.
Getting out of bed was not assumed. Standing required a pause. Walking came with calculation. Even conversation had limits—how long, how much, when to stop.
This was not weakness revealing itself.
It was information.
The day did not ask for ambition. It asked for accuracy. To notice what was possible and stay within it. To stop before depletion. To rest without apology.
Jesus’ words are often misheard as reassurance. They are closer to instruction. Each day has enough—not more than can be borne, not less than is real. The work is not to overcome the day, but to live truthfully inside it.
There was no sense of improvement yet. No upward curve. Only the slow learning of how to inhabit a smaller life without contempt.
What the day allowed had to be enough.
Prayer God, help me attend to what this day allows, and not demand more.
Enough for Today
Matthew 6:11 NRSV “Give us today our daily bread.”
By then, time had lost its markers.
Days were no longer distinguished by plans or progress, only by light and dark. Morning arrived without promise. Night came without relief. The body existed inside a narrow range of possibility, and even that had to be negotiated.
Breathing took effort. Sitting up required calculation. Food was no longer something to enjoy, only something to attempt. A few spoonfuls of broth were an achievement. Not a metaphor. An achievement.
This was not the moment for courage or clarity. It was the long middle, where survival does not feel noble and faith is reduced to what can be managed. The body learned to ask a smaller question.
Not How will this end?
But What is possible now?
Scripture knows this reduction. “Daily bread” is not abundance. It is enough. Enough to remain. Enough to get through the next hour without collapse. Enough to keep the body tethered to the day.
In that room, far from home, nothing was resolved. No meaning announced itself. There was only the discipline of accepting what could be received and refusing what could not. Rest when rest was required. Effort when effort was possible. Waiting without a clock.
This is not resignation.
It is endurance.
Faith, in such moments, does not look upward. It stays close to the body. It learns the measure of what can be held and does not ask for more.
Enough for today had to be enough.
Prayer
God, help me trust that what is enough today is enough.
The Uninvited Day
Some days arrive uninvited. They just happen.
Bags are packed—sometimes decades earlier—then stowed away, waiting. Waiting for the uninvited day. When it comes, the bags tumble out of their hiding places, and the contents explode into life.
Yesterday was such a day.
I had an appointment at a medical office dealing with a disease no one wishes to face. It was, in itself, rather matter-of-fact: identify the disease, consider treatment options, make decisions, do my part as a credible member of the team seeking to eradicate the problem.
But then came the baggage.
The baggage carries the awareness of mortality—not so much my own, but of those I’ve loved. Sitting in the doctor’s office, I was reminded again of how many times my late wife must have had similar conversations. Her cycle of remission and relapse always included consultations like this: the tests, the scans, the waiting for results. I was there for much of it.
Those suitcases have been familiar companions for many years.
But yesterday I unpacked another one I didn’t expect: the one I now call Morbid Math.
Morbid Math began when the doctor alluded to my advanced age, as if age alone dictates outlook. Yes, the older we get, the more we must face our finitude. But as I told him, anyone—at any age—can drop dead in a moment. Statistics may predict probability, but statistics don’t govern individuality.
This is where the science of medicine must, if practiced well, meet the art of medicine. Options may narrow with age, but every life still deserves case-by-case care.
And that’s when the arithmetic began.
In just a few years, I will have lived twice as many years as my late wife. That realization stung. I could have done without it. But the uninvited day doesn’t ask permission to unpack what it brings.
Then came another calculation. I remarried thirty-one years ago this past August. Counting the years of our courtship, Beth and I were together twenty-two years—nineteen of them married. The sheer ratio of years makes comparisons absurd. Yet I know this: Beth and I grew up together, and Lucy and I are growing down together. Each love has its own trajectory.
The problem is that growing up was interrupted. And so, I’ve spent the years since trying, in some way, to complete the work Beth and I began. I got to watch our daughters grow up. She did not.
Thank you, Morbid Math, for that reminder.
Two lifetimes, divided unevenly, yet both defining who I am. Beth didn’t just influence me—she created part of me. But she never saw the whole. In that sense, the sum is zero.
She never saw me in my entirety. I robbed her of that.
I know, unequivocally, that she would have. We were on a trajectory toward that kind of honesty. We even talked about the changes we would make to become more fully ourselves—individually and together. But the equation ended before it could balance.
So yes, yesterday was the uninvited day.
One of the worst I’ve had since the day she died.
But even this arithmetic of loss holds its strange grace: that who I have finally become—the man willing to be raw and vulnerable—is the collaborative work of two women who loved me into wholeness.
Beth began the work. Lucy has helped me finish it.
*I cannot change the sums, but I can live them. And perhaps that, in the end, is
🎵 The Problem with Regret
I have hung my harp upon the years, yet in every wind that passes, I hear her name.
- from the journals of exile
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept;
we hung our harps upon the willows.”
— Psalm 137 : 1-2
I.
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The wind in the reeds made a sound like forgiveness,
But it wasn’t forgiveness I heard — it was fear.
II.
Regret is a carrion bird, circling slow,
Feeding on grief that refuses to die.
Its shadow falls long over everything holy,
And whispers, you could have loved better than I.
III.
It never flies lonely — recrimination comes near,
A beast in the dark with a tongue made of blame.
They feast on the bones of what memory offers,
And leave me the echo, the ache, and the name.
Refrain
It wasn’t the box but the silence that fed them,
The years I mistook for the comfort of peace.
Now I open my hands and the feathers fall upward —
They vanish like breath, but the hunger won’t cease.
IV.
I walk through the hush where her laughter once stood,
Through the door that no heartbeat will open again.
And I hear from the willow the faintest of music —
A string half-broken still answering pain.
Coda
By the waters of memory, I sat down and wept,
And hung my harp on the limb of the years.
The song that I lost is the one that still finds me,
And silence itself is the sound that I fear.
Where All Waters Join
Sometimes grief does not cry out—it drifts, carried by the same current that once bore our joy.
There are moments when loss comes not as thunder but as reflection—when the world stands still, and what we see is not the end but a continuation, changed in form.
I wrote this after a dream of a river and a face that was both Ophelia’s and hers—the one I loved more than life itself.
It is not about death, not really. It’s about arrival: the mystery of the one who was, the one who is, and the one who has yet to come.
I offer it here in gratitude and quiet wonder, a meditation on how love endures beyond the reach of hands.
⸻
I see Ophelia floating, dreamlike,
on the current of a cold river.
The water moves with a whispering insistence,
brushing against stones polished by centuries of sorrow.
Her body is already still,
her face molded by the mercy of the chill
into a child’s perpetual smile.
Then the surface wavers,
and I recognize the curve of her mouth—
not Shakespeare’s daughter of grief,
but the woman I loved more than life itself.
The recognition is the wound.
Not that she is gone,
but that I can no longer feel the warmth
that once made her real.
The ache lives in my hands,
in what they remember
and the water refuses to return.
Yet even as I kneel on the bank,
a strange peace rises.
The river does not end;
it only carries her beyond my reach.
In its mirrored flow I see three arrivals:
the one who was — radiant and laughing in sunlight;
the one who is — still, luminous, beyond decay;
and the one who is yet to come —
the presence that will meet me when my own current slows.
I do not call it faith,
only recognition —
that love does not vanish;
it merely changes address.
The current carries her onward,
and somewhere downstream,
in water not yet visible,
I believe she waits —
not to return,
but to receive.
⸻
And so I let the river keep her, trusting that love, like water, knows its way home.
A lyrical reflection on loss and arrival. Through the image of a woman floating on a twilight river, “Where All Waters Join” explores how love endures beyond separation, and how grief, carried by the current, can become peace.
On a whim... 