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shoulders.
Anne rubbed oil that smelled of rosemary into my
forehead, and made the sign of the cross. Breathe on us.
When Anne
raised her hand to bless us at the end of the service,
the drunk raised his hand, too, and, right along with her,
made the sign of the cross over us all. We were there, empty as the
altar, becoming flesh.
When my husband, Vincent, and I came home from New Mexico
after Kit's death, cards from the people at church were
stacked up on the white table next to our front door like leaves
on a lawn. Mark Benson, who served on my discernment committee,
read a verse from Dr. Seuss into the answering machine
and I scribbled it on a scrap of paper from my brother's house:
"'The storm starts when the drops start dropping. When the
drops stop dropping, then the storm starts stopping.' It feels to me
like what grief is like."
Outside,
green lawns and ivy, fields of yellow mustard, wild lilac
loosed on the hills, palm trees, and beach sand. It was not like
New Mexico where Kit and I grew up and where I had just left
his ashes. In New Mexico dark mesas rise off the desert floor,
heart-shaped leaves of cottonwoods dance by the river, orchards
are fed by each village's acequia madre, the mother ditch.
I dreamed
of a piece of pottery I found on land I own near
Santa Fe. It was colored gray, like ashes, and had the remains of a
design on it, a black V. I thought of the people who had made
that jar, walking, then falling, their bones intertwined in the roots
of the sagebrush under my feet, and then I put it back where I
had found it, in a streambed fed by summer rains.
A bouquet
of flowers arrived from the monks at Mt. Calvary
monastery. The card read, "With love from your brothers."
Vincent and
I couldn't do simple things. We couldn't go to
the grocery store or cook dinner. On our first night back, an
insulated carry-all appeared on the front porch, left there by
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from Practicing Resurrection ©2003 by Nora Gallagher are used
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