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Tenacity
- University of Iowa Press
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.13. we stood, surrounding the gray marble gravestone. It was one of hundreds rising up out of the snow in long, straight rows like a bumper winter crop. There’d been no new storms for severaldays,thewinternowrefinedtoawindthatrakedyourface. This cemetery was a spot of intimately familiar earth, where my brother, Bob, and I had buried our father almost seven years before and where we’d come as children for our grandparents’ funerals. This morning, there were Sue and I, my brother and his wife and their three grown sons, along with the funeral director and the Methodist pastor, a thin, smooth-skinned, soft-voiced man named Reverend Riggle. He was speaking of the certainty of my mother’s eternal reward , which she’d earned at least in part by her devoted service to the church. In the five days since her death, I’d been thinking off and on about the nature of her faith. By which I mostly meant that I’d been trying to imagine how she had imagined the stuff, the substance of an afterlife; that substance of the things she might have hoped for, that evidence of the things she’d not seen, as the letter to the Hebrews speaks of faith. As I listened to Reverend Riggle’s version of the contract with TENACITY a tenacity .14. eternity, I felt an easy scorn, quick as an adolescent’s for anything adult, and I wanted to be more generous than that. I was here, after all, on my dead mother’s, on the reverend’s, on the culture’s terms, and I should honor them. Particularly since there had been a time when I did, when I was a boy and an ardent, humorless believer. Sitting in church with my parents on Sunday morning, I repeatedly looked past the minister at the pulpit to the backdrop of a maroon velvet drape that hung from the ceiling to the floor covering the wall behind the altar. At some point I had come to understand that behind this drape was a secret, luxuriously furnished room and back there, in that room, was where God was. I knew of course that His primary residence was Heaven, so I didn’t presume He lived in the room behind the drape in any daily way. I thought of it as a kind of pied à terre, a place He escaped to now and then, a relaxing weekend in rural Iowa. But here’s the point: that God—the long, white beard, the long, white robe, the elegant wooden staff—that He was back there relaxing on His second-home throne was nothing I fantasized. It was the thrilling truth and I wouldn’t have dared to sneak up in the quiet of an empty sanctuary to pull the drape aside and take a peek. Not that I feared the crushing disappointment of looking at a naked wall. It was, rather, a matter of delicious intimidation as I carried the sense of God’s majesty, the wattage of His radiance, not to mention his Old Testament temper if you crossed Him. So in thinking about my mother’s long Methodist life, I’d been wondering whether at the end of it she’d embraced some adult version—whatever that meant—of my early boyhood’s literal belief. Or had she come to an understanding, or maybe always held it, that led her to a more metaphorical faith? It was a conversation she and I had never had. At the gravesite, the cold was posing us all like waifs, our bodies tightly clenched inside our heavy coats. Our eyes were watering; our noses were running. I looked past Reverend Riggle to the vast tenacity .15. white landscape of fields fertile with winter and heard him pray, “We beseech thee, O Lord, to dispense your perfect kindness to those loved ones gathered here as we commend your servant, Maudie, to your loving care.” We all turned and started toward our cars to drive the short distance to the church. The sky was now a mist and the mist was crystalline, making the wind hurt even more. Still, I paused a moment at the stone sitting squatly in the snow, taken with the feeling, brief as a breath, that I was abandoning my mother, and my father, to this unspeakable weather, and the phrase came to the disrespectful adolescent in me: You could catch your death out here. Ten days back in Boston, I left our condominium...