Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

came out of the bedroom and saw the two of them at the table each week, she felt something

the

Motherhood

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.

Sometimes she thought that all her son’s problems could be traced back to the fact that she hadn’t loved him right away.

This, then, was the hardest part of being a parent. Your children had their private worlds, where you could never protect them. They were yours and yet not yours.

“I’ve learned that it’s best to be honest. With yourself, with others. With God.”

But as far as she had seen, life rarely let you be purely joyful. There was always something there to torture you if you let it.

“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth,” she said in a meeting

God met you where you were. He showed you His face when you needed Him most. She prayed that soon enough He would meet her Patrick.

She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

But old age was like childhood, when if you went a month without seeing someone, you might find an entirely different person waiting.

She had made a choice and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life. Even

One of life’s contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile.

One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.

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.

love was everything in the end, even if it was an imperfect love, a love that depended on memory, on some former version of who they were. Natalie believed that if they let her, Nora would surprise

It wasn’t right that you could only understand your parents’ pain once you’d experienced the things they had, and by then, in her