What He Left in the Book
Home Burial essay series: Number 27
“But no matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life. If a healthy soil is full of death it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds, for which, as for us humans, the dead bodies of the once living are a feast. ...Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life.”
—Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America”
In this room where his body rests, a book lies silent like soil.
For most of the culture, its stories, long buried, don’t speak. The holy might have blossomed here once, but it has gone dormant, its worlds become quiet as the ground.
Breathless, the book lies on a low table near his body, and I do not pick it up. I rarely do.
My mother, however, does. Sitting vigil, she picks up the book and finds three passages highlighted by the hand of the breathless body who lies next to her, buried in the book like seeds.
***
When he made these highlights – each a short passage – no one knows.
The first is from the story of a family who goes to a foreign land when famine has struck their own. The husband dies, the two sons marry women from this new land, but then the sons die, too. Traveling back to her own land in despair, the mother-in-law begs her foreign daughters-in-law to stay behind and make new lives for themselves. One weeps and stays behind. The other, in pink-highlighted words, speaks strongly to her mother-in-law:
“But Ruth said, ‘Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you! For wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’”
This story is about death, first of land and then of people, and then how you make life with what remains.
***
In ancient cultures, families saved stories as they saved seeds – passing them down generation to generation, telling stories about the seeds, making seeds of their stories, praying while they planted. A story was not a dead thing but a living thing that could emerge anew from the mouth of a child, like a flower from the ground. A seed was not a commodity, but like scripture, a narrative being.
But when a story has died, or a seed been homogenized, genetically modified, and made inedible, what then? How do you make life with what remains? How do you recover the pure seed, the original story?
What must you abandon? Who must you go with and what seeds do you slip in your pocket as you walk through modernity’s forced exile from the holy, when you find yourself on that road of abandonment?
***
The phone rings as I write. It is morning, the sun just risen.
“Daddy!” my 11-year-old daughter says. “You should look. There’s a rainbow in the western sky.”
I go outside to look and a light rain falls in the morning glow of sunrise. The rainbow is there, like she said, rooted on both sides but not meeting in the middle, so only blue sky shines at the peak of the incomplete arc.
Above the hollow, a pileated woodpecker swoops at the rainbow while a doe leaps in the field beneath the curved pillars of color.
I go back to write in the same room where we sat vigil more than a year ago. My father’s body is in the ground now, but we never put away the altar from those days – a low, oak table with photographs, drawings, candles, his glasses and that book.
Every morning, I sit before it all in silence.
***
In the quiet room, my mother reads the words that long-ago foreign daughter spoke.
Walking a road to a land she didn’t know, this woman offered something fierce to her despairing mother-in-law.
Do not ask me to abandon or forsake you! For wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
There she walks, certainly in her own despair, vowing herself to a people and a God she has not met, making of herself a seed, planting herself in what remains without knowledge of what will bloom, if anything.
Maybe they will just die on the road and no one will remember them. Still, she walks, abandoning all she knows so that this abandoned one – this elder woman – will not be abandoned.
Together they walk, probably arm in arm, like life and death.
***
My mother flips to the next yellow post-it sticking out of the book some 500 pages away and finds the Hebrew prophet Isaiah speaking these pink highlighted words:
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”
Again, I am interrupted. This child is up so early this morning, getting dressed, feeding the chickens, walking the dog on her first day of homeschool.
She knocks on the door where I write and comes in.
“I brought a gift for you, Daddy,” she says.
Our dog, Zobi, leaps on my lap, and Siporah hands me two fluffy gray chicken feathers. I hug her good morning, then stick the feathers between two pages in the open book.
We chat, then she leaves and I flip to the third passage, and read what someone wrote ages ago, which someone else highlighted in green, which someone else read while sitting with the body whose hand had made those marks.
The incomplete rainbow has faded, leaving only sky. My daughter trots along somewhere in the hollow. My father lies beneath the ground among dead things, and also among seeds, among small shoots and roots always emerging beneath the surface; nobody causing them to do this, but just growing as seeds do, little uncaused causes, in total silence and incomprehensible humility.
In the room, I read the third passage and hear a confluence of voices, some dead, and some, like my own, like yours, living, sprouting roots and shoots beneath the soil.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.