Light, Dark
Light. Last Sunday afternoon. The brief, brilliant sun bedazzling through the high window in the town hall auditorium. The audience arriving, shedding coats, searching for friends; the musicians warming up on stage. Henry in his tux, a quick smile (just for me) as he files past to take his place on the risers, preparing to sing. My neighbor Debbie sitting beside me, sharing her chocolate chip cookies. Familiar faces in the crowd. Christmas trees festooned with white lights, men in holiday sweaters and red neckties, the lady selling homemade baked goods at the table in the back, the rustle of programs, the golden light, the expectant hush that hovers just before the first note of song bursts through the silence and takes flight. My son, who will turn twenty-three this week, standing onstage before a packed house in our home town; his deep, sure tenor filling the room, filling my heart till it pushes against my chest and overflows and I am brushing away happy, astonished tears. All these years, and I’ve never once heard this most private child of mine sing out loud — till now, here, this deeply felt solo performed in a room packed with people who have paid money to come.
Dark. The night before, crowding into the small room at the funeral home, surrounded by family from near and far. The photograph of my uncle as a young man himself, crew-cut earnest and just out of school, gazing toward an unknown future that would hold more than its share of heartbreak. The small urn full of ashes, a fishing scene etched onto the side, and above it that photo I’ve known all my life, the same photo that hung on the parlor wall of my grandmother’s house alongside two more, a triptych of brothers framed in gold and presiding silently there through the long quiet afternoons of my childhood, when I would study every ancestral image, every picture in the crowded gallery of family likenesses.
Reassembling those memories to meet the present: the dear, familiar faces of aunts and uncles and cousins, each one softened and creased by age and time; it has been too long since I last saw them. My cousin’s children, suddenly grown and confronting a new truth: even larger-than-life grandfathers die. (Wasn’t it just yesterday that they were children running wild with my own boys through the frozen November field behind my parents’ house?)
Anecdotes gathered up and shared haltingly. The unaccustomed effort of giving voice to what’s hard and sad and lost. The three brothers who have suddenly become two, oldest and youngest, the one in between gone at seventy-one. An image in my mind from years ago: my brawny uncle with his sideburns and beard and aviator glasses, his inexhaustible supply of stories, holding forth at Thanksgiving dinner, spinning tales from events he remembered that everyone else had long since forgotten. And then, later, the long trip home, fighting to stay awake as my father drives down the empty highway. The odd sensation of being both a fifty-four year old mother of two grown sons and, at the same time, a child again myself, sitting alone in the back seat of my parents car, the backs of their heads as familiar to me as my own two hands.
Light. It is dusk. The only lamp on in the dark, silent house is here, beside the sofa where I sit surrounded by evening shadows. I type these words slowly, from within a small, golden patch of brightness.
Dark. The paragraphs above, written early yesterday morning, so trivial today, as the news from Connecticut settles upon our shoulders like a heavy, black cloak of brutal knowing. Innocent children dead, families ripped apart, the nation shaken once again by tragedy beyond reason or comprehension. Grief and anger, the deep sense of failure and helplessness. Gratitude for a life that is intact intermingled with mourning for lives lost and for lives ruined.
Sun and shadow. Joy and heartache. Life and death. To be human is to become intimate with both darkness and light. It has always been so. Yet on this somber December day, we are asked to do even more: somehow we must carry on with our lives as they are and, too, we must stop in our tracks, and look with clear gaze into the ruins.
How to respond to such a random, meaningless act of violence? How to honor the grief caused by this rampage of mindless destruction? How to accommodate and embrace both the darkness and the light of today?
Perhaps there is no good answer, other than to honor the sanctity of life by loving more and loving better, whatever that means for each of us. Compassion is the thread that binds us to one another. Compassion is the balm that heals the soul. Compassion is the offering we carry to the altar of regret and anger and grief. Compassion is what clears our vision, so we may begin to see, even in the midst of the darkest and most unspeakable horror, the light of something larger than our own understanding at work. Compassion is what allows us to seek redemption in the midst of tragedy — to reach out a hand and step toward rather than away from, to act rather than to wait for others to act in our stead. Compassion is, perhaps, the point of the journey, both our purpose and our calling, the place where healing and hope for tomorrow resides. A reminder that in all its shadow and its light, this fragile, fleeting life is full of beauty and meaning nonetheless.
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