One of my trustworthy counselors said to me some years ago, as we were talking about this old place, the grandparents who first made it home, and my longing to share a bit of it with the world, “Maybe you should just keep it to yourself.” While it didn’t exactly hurt my feelings—well, maybe a little, I was taken aback. Perhaps he really meant “keep it for yourself.” He’s family, so I know his intentions were pure, but I am a writer. Telling the stories is how I process life. It’s the way I name the gifts and feel the shape of the too-hard things, turn them over, gauge their weight, until I get to that “tender surrender to (God’s) wiser and kinder ways.”* He has allowed this in our lives so I will be able to bear it. These hard things are part of the story, if we “tell it anything like right.”

My father’s side of the family is Scandinavian. We Swedes and Norwegians keep our personal lives close, our emotions modulated. We circle the wagons in times of trouble, do our suffering in private, “keep it to ourselves.” Stoic feels comfortable. Mom was not Scandinavian. She once kicked her shoe off walking in after work, sending it flying into the glass-framed picture on the living room wall.

Sometimes I don’t have the words for the feeling or fear until I write them . . . or read them from someone who’s already found them. Yes, that.

I dreamed of my father when he was old.
We went to see some horses in a field;
they were sorrels, as red almost as blood,
the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.
Though they came to us, all a-tremble
with curiosity and snorty with caution,
they had never known bridle or harness.
My father walked among them, admiring,
for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.
He leaned on a cane and dragged his feet
along the ground in hurried little steps
so that I called to him to take care, take care,
as the horses stamped and frolicked around him.
But while I warned, he seized the mane
of the nearest one. “It’ll be all right,”
he said, and then from his broken stance
he leapt astride, and sat lithe and straight
and strong in the sun’s unshadowed excellence.

—Wendell Berry, “Come Forth,” New Collected Poems, Entries (1994

I’m struck with this poem at first reading. Keep coming back to it. Somehow it comforts me? Wounds me? Ruffles the surface of that deep place inside that knew this was coming.

Even your doctors, the ones who say how well you are doing, see only your slow walk, stooped frame, your dogged trying, your sometimes angry, frustrated demeanor. They don’t see you as your children, grandchildren, and I do, strong, patient, sacrificial, protective, capable, funny. Fueled by hard work and a challenge. Always the last through the line, affable, entertaining. Carrying every heavy load before anyone else even notices. I carried my own suitcase for the first time in thirty-five years as I traveled into Canada one summer with fellow teachers at a NEH seminar at North Dakota State University. Your kids are all like you.

Maybe it would be easier if you were a book and a pipe kind of guy but you’re not. Work has always been your play. An old wrestling coach still pushing your body to its limits, tired and satisfied at the end of the day. Taming the grounds around you and the old house with just what you have, your old hand tools, your vision. Growing up the hard-scrabble way you count on only what you can do with your hands. So, how do you wake up with purpose, a reason to get out of bed, when your body lets you down? How can I be the partner this man needs? The unanswerable questions.

We stand in the kitchen in morning light, breakfast nearly ready. I’ve cut up the peaches for our fruit bowls but haven’t fried the eggs or pushed the toast down. The bones of your chest press hard into mine, that chest that used to be so thick and strong, a cushion against everything. I kiss your neck, you my cheek and we stay this way breathing each other in, our morning ritual. You move slowly to your chair with our refilled cups, and I fry the eggs.

Sometimes my mind replays the little nudges along the way, before this new normal, “This is a gift, you know. Mark it. Remember it.” And I think I did. I wrote them down and named them, knowing deep that they were fleeting . . . The red branches cut from the point above the water for my fall kitchen window boxes. The popcorn and apples for supper like when we were young and the kids had been tucked in bed. You in my thick knit hat on a brittle -20 degree afternoon stacking wood by the kitchen door, cheeks too cold to shape a smile. You on one knee stoking the old wood stove for the night. Filling the Folgers can with gravel for my little Christmas tree from the woods. Joking and gesturing with your sons as you hold court before being rolled down to surgery, your spark intact.

Perhaps I alone will always see you “. . . lithe and straight and strong in the sun’s unshadowed excellence.” Maybe that’s still the secret to being the partner you need. Is it enough? It’s a start.

Thank you, Wendell.