The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name.
- Robert Penn Warren, “Tell Me a Story”
I know a story about America. In this story a father, coughing and pale from days interred with the Iowa coal seams, drinks himself half to death over a stillborn baby. The stillbirth is out of the ordinary. The near-death drinking is not. The father collects that little body in some spare blanket, soiled in blood and afterbirth, to carry it through town on a muggy night in August. Or maybe a crisp one in November. It doesn’t matter. He’s alone, the child tucked under one arm. He drags in his free hand a shovel.
He finds an out-of-the-way corner of the town graveyard and he sets to digging. He swigs at the bottle in his pocket when he thinks to. When the hole seems deep enough or when he can’t any longer keep his balance above it, he places that stiffening bundle at its bottom. For half an hour he anoints with tears and other pitiful fluids the soil filling it in. He does his best to hide any sign of a burial.
He will come-to out of doors, accosted by a sun overcoming the treetops. When he finally returns, his wife wants to know where her baby is buried, where she can find her passenger of all those months. But he doesn’t know, can’t remember, but for the drink and the dark. She leaves him standing right there to stalk the rows of the graveyard herself. But every over-turned stone or patch of grass looks like every other.
I know this story because I stood, 14 years old, amidst the uncanny summer green of an Iowa cemetery, listening to my grandmother report the family lore: a stillborn sibling, a father at the bottom of a bottle, a grave’s location lost. In my memory, my eyes wandered to the line where graveyard lawn and thicket abut. But even if we could divine the spot, there’d never been a name for the marker anyway.
The truth is that all babies die. The difference that makes a difference is when. It is, as we say, a matter of time. No small part of parenthood, consequently, consists in a long night’s watch against the fear of loss. A hand reaches, compelled, into the crib, feeling for the rise and fall of breath. Every child delivers to their parents a license to hope for time not promised. Between these—the present hope and the absent promise—God has strung the weight of love.
After my son was born, when the feeding and changing and bathing quieted down, that weight would sometimes pin my wife and me to the floor. Evenings, I would discover her crying mutely beside me in our bed. “He’s so little and helpless. I can’t stop thinking he could die.” What could I say? He probably won’t? Statistics little slackened the chord of anxiety she felt. It was, after all, anchored at one end to a mere possibility and at the other to an inevitability, both undeniable. In the meantime, our boy slept just beyond the foot of our bed, swaddled and breathing in the same white-painted crib where his mother had been rocked and worried over almost three decades before.
I’m my parents’ oldest, but not their firstborn. Elizabeth had stopped moving and my mother knew it, as she likewise knew that her tiny breathless body would still have to be given birth. My mother sometimes mentions how—after—my father sat by himself and sobbed, but he never does. Not long before they lost Elizabeth (maybe in the same year, I don’t remember) my mom lost her mother, Betty Jane, to lung cancer at not-even sixty. Fear of losing our children trails behind it a fear that they will too soon lose us. But the truth is it’s always too soon.
Only lately have I come to appreciate how my life began in an amniotic grief. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Elizabeth’s name. For many reasons, but this among them, neither can I remember a time when I didn’t live on ground saturated with sadness. Most of the time I’m free to stride above and across it. Its water table rises and falls. But if I dig, it will always bubble up into the hollow I’ve made for it. What I appreciate now is that not all of the sadness is mine. When (God willing, many years from now) my parents have died and if I’m still alive, their grief will distend itself beyond their time and through mine. The time without Elizabeth will go on. It may even go on in the lives of my son and his sisters, if they manage to both inherit some portion of my persistent sadness and find in it some link to this piece of family history.
But before long, even the grief will be lost.
My sister lies awake at nights and thinks about dying. I don’t as much anymore. “It just…ends,” she says. I know the rest without her having to say: every joy, every pain, every taste of chocolate, every burning shame, every load of laundry, every moment is now over and there are no more moments out ahead. In whatever sense you had them, in death they are taken and you—your very being-yourself—are taken with them.
She might believe in God, but I know for sure my sister does not ascribe to something like a religious faith. Though, I think we overestimate the extent to which that might help. Even stipulating a next life, whether some pure and timeless spiritual union with God or the more fulsome resurrected life of Christian tradition, I can’t suppose it’ll be the same as this one. In that final tipping away, no more can we have these moments in this way. Of course, for many believers that is the whole point. “Where sickness, sorrow, pain, and death / are felt and feared no more,” goes the hymn. The passing character of this life, after all, has been taken for evidence we should not overly cherish it. But we do cherish it. We love it, in ourselves and at our best even more we love it in others. And death takes it from us. Worse, death seems to say we never had it in the first place.
Death mystifies us generally, but why it cuts so many lives so short, some of them barely lived at all, is a shard of inexplicability in our hearts. Now, the person of faith insists, even if first of all to themselves and though it cannot promise any consolation, the bleak darkness of such loss is submerged in a deeper, but somehow super-luminous darkness of Divine love. Or, to put it another way, when we wonder why death takes a life too soon, there is drawn into the background a more wondrous puzzle: why are there lives to be taken at all? The Christian answer to this puzzle is, at one level, merely heuristic: fundamentally we owe our lives to the wisdom of God—whatever that turns out to be—according to which God eternally decides we should live them.
But I am quite serious that this claim offers no intrinsic consolation. Nor is it the bit of wishful thinking the non-believer might suspect. For, while I believe the reality of God beyond reasonable dispute, the question remains (warranted by the evils of this life among which stillborn babies must surely be counted) whether God merits our worship or whether God is, to put it bluntly, a real asshole. Could not “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away” prove no more than the arbitrary rules of a sadistic cosmic game? The Book of Job even hints at the prospect and does not quite bring itself to proffer a clinching refutation. “I’m God and you’re not,” is my dad’s distillation. Still, we might identify a nucleus of Christian faith qua faith in a commitment, a decision that our life has for its source God’s benevolence rather than divine malice. “Before we love this life,” we testify according to our faith, “God loves it and, by loving it, brings it into being from sheer nothingness.”
Beneath the blankets in our Milwaukee bedroom, my wife was consumed again with tearful anxiety over the fragility of our firstborn. A couple years before, in Boston, a teacher had recognized me as the type who prays with his metaphysics, and so I began to rehearse to Annie these same logical implications of calling God our Creator. What God makes God loves, and what God loves God knows. Further, God makes, loves, and knows eternally. Nor is the eternity of this making loving knowing something that begins or ends. Nor is it something that passes into even an infinite past, nor emerges into an infinite, but somehow unforeseen future. No, all of God’s making loving knowing is a single, perfect, living and luminous act. Nothing loved or known in and by this act is ever, can ever be lost. But our son is loved by God, known by God. We know that for sure, because there he is. And so even if he should be lost to us, and even should the grief that is our love’s distention be lost with the passing of time, he will never not be known and loved with the Divine loving knowledge that funds and founds our lives. “What’s more,” I whispered to the mother of my son, “the same goes for you and me.” We too are made by God, and so loved by God and known by God, and so are forever with our boy (and his sisters and Elizabeth and her parents and that nameless beloved buried somewhere in the Iowa soil) in the swaddling darkness of God’s light.
To my fair surprise, she found this prospect comforting too and eventually we slept.
In part, my surprise owed to the difficulty with which we picture this metaphysical arrangement, what theologians call “eternal spiritual union with God.” Probably only the mystic has the imaginal resources and the rest of us are left to struggle over their poetry. But to that metaphysical assurance, Christian hope adds the promise of resurrected bodies. We tell ourselves, with the Nicene Creed, that there will be a new heaven (whatever that might mean), but also a new earth. What theologians call the “general resurrection” returns to the imagination, along with these bodies and this earth, its enabling frame of time and space. While the lance of metaphysical inference penetrates somewhat deeply, if narrowly into it, our imaginations can forcefully, if always bluntly, sometimes shallowly broadside our hope for life that survives death. The added mass of our feelings multiplies the force of such imaginings. But we should be careful not to conflate these approaches. Jesus scolds the Sadducees for treating their fantasies of the resurrection like premises. Still, overall, we probably need both. Even us oddities given to praying with our metaphysics.
And so, I find myself imagining. I let myself imagine. Freeze after freeze has rendered the verdant bordering thicket a crosshatch of bare branches. A fresh carpet of snow has swept beneath itself the dormant cemetery lawn, the tallest headstones jutting through it. The sky is grey with the velveteen luster of a January morning. From an out-of-the-way corner of the graveyard, an infant’s tremolo bawl shimmers off the windless quiet. Ruddy with the rage of life, a newborn boy lies face up in the snow, steam rising up around him like breath. Hands—a working man’s hands, expansive and calloused—lift and loosely swaddle him into a blanket. This time the blanket is clean. This time the hands are deft. This time the child is wriggling. A father’s eyes find a son’s, but then a mother’s and the bundle passes between them. Mother and child take to nursing, leaving father to take in the scene. He finds himself surprised that he’s willing to look at this place. Used to be he wasn’t. And in looking—I imagine—he sees at his feet a marker, un-weathered, fresh-hewn. It bears a name: David. He never had much schooling, but, somehow, he knows it means “beloved.”
