Abide with Me

by Elizabeth Strout

for quite some while his story was told in towns up and down the river, and as far over as the coast, until it emerged with enough variations so as to lose its original punch, and just the passing of time, of course, will affect the vigor of these things.

And today—the one we’ve chosen to start with—was lovely in its sunny brightness, the tops of those distant trees a brave and brilliant yellowy-red. Even keeping in mind how this kind of autumn day can be an awful thing, harsh and sharp as broken glass, the sky so blue it could break down the middle, the day was perfectly beautiful, too.

Tyler thought he wouldn’t go for his morning walk; he’d sit right here where another fellow had struggled apparently with righteousness, and probably loneliness, too.

Did Connie know—she probably did—that she was one of those women you pass in the grocery store and see without seeing? But there was a softness in her face, a touching hesitancy, as though she had spent many years trying to be cheerful and no longer was, but the remnants of an earlier, eager kindness still remained.

Who, after all, wasn’t afraid, deep down, as Pascal had been, of those “spaces of nothing . . . which know nothing of me”? Who, in God’s world, he thought, wasn’t glad to hear that his presence really mattered?

the important thing—the amazement of those beautiful mismatched dresses and shoes—rose as big as a mountain and her words were little ants that couldn’t make the climb;

Leaving office buildings or grocery stores, walking across parking lots, people tended to tuck their chins down this time of day, to clutch at their coats, as though the darkening brought with it some inner shrinking.

He thought of Bonhoeffer writing that it was not love that sustained a marriage but the marriage that would sustain the love.

“In our intimate life, he makes me feel very bad. In our private life. He makes me feel very inadequate.”

He thought how Bonhoeffer had written from prison, “There is a wholeness about the fully grown man which enables him to face an existing situation squarely.”

“Isn’t it a characteristic of a grown man, in contrast to an immature person, that his center of gravity is always where he actually is?”

People not familiar with towns like West Annett may not realize as they drive through the gully of trees leading to the sparseness of its Main Street that a social hierarchy exists there, exactly as it does in prisons, sixth grades, and Beacon Hill apartment buildings.

Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Understand—the inland reaches of northern New England, with its quick, hot summers, and long, dark winters, had bred for generations a way of life that had at its center the need to endure. A child slipping on an icy driveway, banging his chin against the car door, would most likely be told, “Grit your teeth and bear it,” even when one of the teeth had, as in the case of Toby Dunlop, gone straight through the lower lip, poking out the other side. No trip to the doctor was needed. “You’ll live,” he was told, and he did—bearing a small white scar that he never showed anyone except his first girlfriend. 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.

kids wanted fathers to have answers.

The boy nodded, looked back down at the paper, the side folded just the way the newspaper on Charlie’s lap was. That he had reproduced any part of himself seemed to Charlie a mistake of almost biblical proportions. That this reproduction should present itself in such big-eared, pale-skinned innocence brought a searing pain to Charlie’s troubled stomach. For years he had taught at the Academy, and he viewed the variety of his students’ awkwardness from behind a safe shield of indifference; they had the benefit, after all, of not being his. He closed his eyes, and an image came to mind: walking up behind his boy, wrapping an arm around his skinny body, pressing his own cheek against the boy’s, saying quietly, “You are good, and you are loved. And for your own sad sake I wish you hadn’t been born.”

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.

He understood—as he stared out his kitchen window now—that on both sides of the aisle on the day of their wedding was the unspoken understanding that each was marrying down.

The idea that there might be an afterlife horrified Connie. She had a hard enough time with this one. 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.

Did George know that about himself, he wondered. What did people know about themselves? Tyler leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Because he was scared. He was scared to have an opinion. The only opinion that ever mattered in that house was Mother’s. What he meant was, Always think of Margaret Caskey first, because if you don’t, God help you.” “Belle, for—” “It’s true. And I’m sorry, Tyler, about what you’ve gone through, but you are—excuse me—an idiot. If you’re always thinking of the other person first, you don’t have to bother with what you’re feeling. Or thinking.”

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.

On Saturday mornings, Lauren slept late and Tyler would go to the bakery at the bottom of the hill and buy doughnuts and the newspaper. Lauren would just be stirring when he arrived back, the blankets piled over her head. He would undress and get back into bed. “Let’s do this when we’re eighty,” he said one morning, smoothing back her hair from her moistened face. “Yes, oh, yes,” she said. And why wouldn’t they? World without end—their happiness.

“But gossip is the only kind of conversation that’s fun,” she wailed.

He didn’t like it himself, picturing those goddamn rich people you saw sometimes in the summer, coming into the post office to buy stamps with a hundred-dollar bill. Taking pictures of the grocery store, for christ’s sake. Saying to each other, “Isn’t this town cute?”

He watched her, trying to remember the mother of his youth, and he could not. It seemed the woman seated on the couch was made of molecules pressed so tightly together that her face, her long fingers, her small ankles, could all have been made of some metal beneath the skin, and yet she was perishable, he thought. Everyone was.

“Don’t do that, Tyler Caskey. Don’t pretend that you need to keep secrets from me just because you don’t like the way I react to them.”

“Do you think,” Tyler wrote, “that because we have learned the sun does not go down, that in fact we are going around at a dizzying speed, that the sun is not the only star in the heavens—do you think this means we are any less important than we thought we were? Oh, we are far less important than we thought we were, and we are far, far more important than we think we are. 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.”

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.

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.”