Abide with Me

by Elizabeth Strout

Who, in God’s world, he thought, wasn’t glad to hear that his presence really mattered?

If the men were not especially talkative, their fathers had not been, either. If the women cooked meals that might seem, to someone from other parts, flavorless and straightforward, it is because they cooked what was available to them: chicken, potatoes, canned corn. And if their children were not allowed Novocain when having their cavities drilled, it was not cold-heartedness but a belief that life was a struggle, character honed every step of the way.

Her father put his huge hand over her knee, and gave a little squeeze. It made her laugh, that delicious squiggle of a golden magic wand inside her knee. And when, in a few moments, he took his big, warm hand away, the loss felt as awful as her knee had felt happy.

Connie couldn’t recall anybody ever saying, “Tell me about yourself.” She didn’t know what to tell. In her mind, she was a faint pencil line on a piece of paper; everyone else was drawn in ink, some—like the minister—with a firm Magic Marker.

It puzzled her, but she felt as though the long road of her life that lay ahead, that long, open-ended road where all sorts of wonderful things could happen (because she was young and wouldn’t die for ages) had curved around, and so many things were now decided. That delicious question—who will I marry?—had been answered. That delicious desire—I will be a teacher!—had come to pass. She hadn’t had her children yet—there was still that—but sometimes, like this morning, she had a momentary shiver of some irretrievable loss, and even as the principal, Mr. Waterbury, raised a cheerful hand and she waved back, she longed, in some deep part of her, to bury herself in a grown-up’s lap.

Katherine nodded. After a moment she asked, “How come Nana doesn’t like me?” “Pumpkin, Nana loves you.” Katherine kicked her feet, then was still. “She doesn’t act like it.” “Well.” Tyler put both arms around Katherine’s tiny torso, and squeezed her in a hug. “Nana worries a lot,” he said, “and sometimes people have so much going on in their heads, they get their wires crossed.”

“As a matter of fact, I could argue that none of us has a center of gravity. That we’re tugged and pulled by competing forces every minute and we hold on as best we can.”

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”

The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide—thought God existed in the hymn itself, in the yearning and sorrowful acknowledgment of the loneliness and fears that arrived in life. The expression of it, the truthfulness of it, was what was beautiful.

And it was, to Tyler, this mysterious combination of hope and sorrow that was itself a gift from God. Still—it was hard for Tyler to understand what he felt. It was as though in his long, heavy sleeps, many ideas he had previously had were shifting slowly and getting buried beneath new and shapeless ones.

“Where there are people, there is always the hope of love.”