Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable. We went on, the three of us remaining, as we had to do. In all the practical ways we managed fine. Grandmam was still a vigorous woman, as she would be for years yet. My father, though seriously damaged by his loss for a while at least, was capable and a master of making do. I was big enough then to do a woman’s part, and I did it. But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

I was making myself at home. In the dark way of the world I had come to what would be my life’s place, though I could not yet know the life I would live in it.

Part of the grief would be that the hurt or the dead one would be absent, thousands of miles away. Part of the grief would be that this loss made you somehow guilty, for you were lucky, you were spared, and yet it showed that the worst possibilities were real, for you as for the others.

One day we knew that Tom Coulter was dead somewhere in Italy. Nothing changed. There was no funeral, no place to send flowers or gather with the neighbors to offer your useless comfort. But this knowledge had come.

Kindness kept us alive. It made us think of each other.

By kindness I was coming to understand what it meant to be in love with Virgil. He and I had been, we were, we are—for there is no escape—in love together. I went into love with Virgil, and of course we were not the only ones there. To be in love with Virgil was to be there, in love, with his parents, his family, his place, his baby. When he became lost to our living love in this world, by knowing what it meant to me I couldn’t help knowing what it meant to the others. That was our kindness. It saved us, but it was hard to bear.

began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

He knew that I was living in loss, that the baby had been born into loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil’s absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

She came to us like love between lovers, the answer to a need we would not have had if she hadn’t come.

To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength—that changed me.

Grieved as I was, half destroyed as I sometimes felt myself to be, I didn’t get mad about Virgil’s death. Who was there to get mad at? It would be like getting mad at the world, or at God. What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say. Was Virgil a hero? In his dying was he willing to die, or glad to sacrifice his life? Is the life and freedom of the living a satisfactory payment to the dead in war for their dying? Would Virgil think so? I have imagined that he would. But I don’t know. Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever “missing”? Who can speak for a young man gone clean out of the world, whose body was maybe blown all to nothing, in the midst of terrible fear or pain, in the midst of his last prayer?

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.

in time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

Members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together.

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

After they all were gone, I was mourning over them to Nathan. I said, “I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.” Nathan said, “Don’t complain about the chance you had,”

The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

After she left, the house slowly filled up with silence. Nathan’s absence came into it and filled it. I suffered my hard joy, I gave my thanks, I cried my cry. And then I turned again to that other world I had taught myself to know, the world that is neither past nor to come, the present world where we are alive together and love keeps us.

As many who have known it have said of it, war is Hell. It is the outer darkness beyond the reach of love, where people who do not know one another kill one another and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, where nothing is allowed to be real enough to be spared.

You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering.

But Christ’s living unto death in this body of our suffering did not end the suffering. He asked us to end it, but we have not ended it. We suffer the old suffering over and over again. Eventually, in loving, you see that you have given yourself over to the knowledge of suffering in a state of war that is always going on. And you wake in the night to the thought of the hurt and the helpless, the scorned and the cheated, the burnt, the bombed, the shot, the imprisoned, the beaten, the tortured, the maimed, the spit upon, the shit upon.

I know by now that the love of ghosts is not expectant, and I am coming to that. This Virgie of mine, this newfound “Virge,” is the last care of my life, and I know the ignorance I must cherish him in. I must care for him as I care for a wildflower or a singing bird, no terms, no expectations, as finally I care for Port William and the ones who have been here with me. I want to leave here openhanded, with only the ancient blessing, “Good-bye. My love to you all.”