Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Medicine has taught me, really taught me, to accept the things I cannot change. A difficult-to-swallow serenity prayer. I’m not trying to change the past. I’m telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest.

I watch you now, home from college, that time after graduation when y’all young people either find your way or slide down the slope of uncertainty.

I have prayed about that. Please, Lord, reveal my heart to me.

You’re used to my hovering, though each year you need me less and less, and I mourn the slipping.

There are a lot of things a mother can say to hurt her child, even long after the child is an adult.

I could listen to the music and hum along with the hymn, find solace in the notion that God knew how much burden we could bear.

My wife calls me a mama’s boy, and she’s probably right. But this I can tell you—I can do this case precisely because I am a mama’s boy. My parents left Europe and came to this country fearing for their lives. And from the moment I was born, right here in Montgomery, they raised me to fight for what is right.

“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow.

You can’t help others if you’re down and out.

“I never thought a nun would tell me I could love too hard.” “Only Jesus’s love is ...

I had never known that good intentions could be just as destructive as bad ones.

You smell that right there? That’s the scent of the Maker. And the Maker loves you and your beautiful brown self.

Alicia had said she became a nurse to prove that God was real. Well, I had gone to nursing school to make a difference. I could not be cautious like Daddy, nor could I live in the clouds like Mama. I had to act.

But this year taught me that only God knows how much we can bear.”

Right before my eyes Lou had acquired a way of knowing in the world, what the folks used to call an old spirit.

It was hard not to feel the light of his presence.

I needed to talk to her, to tell her I understood how a person could get so caught up in doing good that they forgot that the people they served had lives of their own.

I feel protected, the whole of me, in all my broken pieces under that blue. It is a wonder to behold this land, this God-filled country. My daddy hovers in it, whispering to me that it will all be fine, his thick fingers on my brow. He has always been with me, and he is with me now.