Abide with Me

by Elizabeth Strout

There was a fear the man lived with, a dark cave inside him: that he might not feel The Feeling again.

Oh, they were happy that night. Waking early, they were happy again, their breath mingling, the slipperiness beneath his arms as they loved each other.

People thought suffering made you stronger, but Connie thought that was baloney; stronger for what? Death? If there was some kind of afterlife, then was the suffering supposed to get you a faster train ride to heaven?

What if death was a big garbage bag where the body went, but the mind was left to hang on forever, suspended with its thoughts? That was Connie’s idea of hell.

Except it was all foolishness; there weren’t rooms in heaven or hell; there was no heaven or hell.

Many people, particularly Protestants whose ancestors had come from Puritan stock and had been living up in New England for many, many years, held an attitude toward money that had wrapped around it some cloak of unsavory secrecy.

In this room he had once said to his wife that he liked that Kierkegaard’s name meant “churchyard.”

The name means ‘graveyard.’

Cheap grace was this—the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.

“Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?”

“Well, Mother, there seems to be a silly rumor. The kind of thing that happens in a small town, when people are bored with their own lives and needing some excitement.”

Do you imagine that the scientist and the poet are not united? Do you assume you can answer the question of who we are and why we are here by rational thought alone? It is your job, your honor, your birthright, to bear the burden of this mystery. And it is your job to ask, in every thought, word, and deed: How can love best be served?

“Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”