Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Longevity was no mark of anything. Things could come apart so fast. “But that’s true for everyone,” Mother Lucy Joseph said. “Think of a marriage, husband and wife. The piece of paper, the white wedding dress, they don’t promise anything. A person has to stay there, fight for it, every day.”

Communication was supposed to be the thing now. In theory, you could reach anyone anytime. When Nora saw her children, they always had their phones in hand. When she called her children, they rarely picked up.

When she was young and thought of marriage in the abstract, she believed it was about two individuals, each living a mostly independent existence. Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.

The deeper you came into union with God, the more you came to accept people the way they were. And yet, there were some who could never be accepted or forgiven.

They might never know what happened. They would each go forward, seeing it in their own ways, just as they did with all the other secrets they had chosen to share or not share with one another.

It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk around leaking it everywhere. It could lie dormant inside you for days, weeks, years. You could seem a perfectly whole person to everyone you met. Without warning, grief might poke you in the ribs, punch you in the gut, knock the wind out of you. But even then, you seemed just fine. The world went on and on.

Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.