Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.

“Who are we to say their lives are meaningless! Who are we to say a person has no value?”

Who defines what is weakness? I’d wondered. Isn’t it only the strong who get to decide that? Isn’t it only the strong who have the power to act on what they decide? How can that be right or fair or good?

“But how do you know her life was miserable because of it? And what gives you the right to decide who is worthy to be a mother or a father and who is not? What gives you the right to judge whose life has value and whose doesn’t as if you were—” “As if I were God?” he cuts in. “I’ve heard that before from people like you who haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” “I was going to say, ‘as if you are better than everyone else.’ God doesn’t devalue people the way you do,” I say evenly.

“In your heart. Just like you are probably inside hers. She’s there, isn’t she? You feel her there, yes? It’s why you whisper to her at night in your bed. Because she’s right there inside you.” Amaryllis blinks slowly as she considers this, and then she nods. I can see in her eyes that this is not the same as seeing Rosie’s face, hearing her voice, holding her hand. But I know too well this is the way, the only way, to keep close to you someone who is gone from your life. It is better than the alternative—isn’t it?—which is never having had them at all.

“Power like that can’t be stopped,” and my own voice saying back to him, “Of course it can.” It can. It is stopped. All the time. Not with a magic wand or hopeful thoughts or wishful thinking or mere words, but with courage and resolve and the refusal to allow those without voices to remain unheard. This is what makes us sublimely human, isn’t it? Not unsullied genetic perfection, but when we stubbornly love and honor one another. Just the way we are.

How we treat one another is what we are still able to do something about.