#59.7, Thursday, August 15, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Ana asked me to hold her hand.

         “Laz, I know you are worried and hurting and I only thought if you were asked to pray for someone else who was in grief, you would just get beyond yourself. I didn’t know he was just going to walk in and you would have to deal with him so directly.”

         “I know this frustration. It is a prayer thing.  And it is exactly the prayer thing that weighs most heavily on me just now.”

         “A prayer thing?” she asks.

         “It’s not anything keeping me from prayer, or allowing me to pretend I am praying when I am not.  It is that thing that is the most disconcerting about prayer, that God answers in God’s way, and it isn’t always an answer I’m willing to accept. It is just that sometimes the answer comes in asking me to do an uncomfortable thing.”

         Ana is confused, “So you don’t really want God to be with Vizsla in his grief?”

         “I didn’t want Vizsla’s grief to be my responsibility. I wanted to cast it off onto God. But more than that, the matter here is that God knows, whether or not I speak it aloud. Even if I ponder it wordless in the depths of my love, you know, and I know it is my prayer over and over again that you won’t have to go through a terrible thing here with this pebble in your breast.  I know what everyone isn’t saying, and I know what I don’t want said. And even God isn’t answering that prayer according to my wishes.”

         Ana answers as a matter of fact, “We know now it isn’t a pebble or a pea, Laz. It is a whole root of something terrible. We have to acknowledge that reality, to say it to one another, to do with it whatever is asked of us.”

         I don’t want to hear Ana’s voice tell me this.  I want to be the one who knows just what to do and fixes this thing. We say nothing more.

         Now Ana is sleeping. This deep and peaceful quietude, dark and terrible, but also, she is promising a gift of time we have for sharing more in life. I spread her beautiful flow of pure white hair onto the pillow and spread the blanket to keep the night draft from her shoulders.

         Hannah and Vizsla come in quietly, together, holding hands, hollowed and drained by their own work here and their own tears.

(Continues Tuesday, August 20, 2024)