[Our community has been touched by death twice in recent days – once at the loss of David Stewart, who contributed so much to memories at SSU, and even more recently at the loss of Debbie MacDonald’s daughter, Tammy, after a long and brave journey with cancer. These losses made me appreciate this passage from a novel by Wendell Berry:]
Back there at the beginning, as I see now, my life is almost entirely memory and very little time. Toward the end of my life at Squire’s Landing I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in. Finally it wears in. Finally I realized and fully accepted that one day I would belong entirely to memory, and it would not be my memory that I belonged to….
Some days, sitting here on my porch over the river, my memory seems to enclose me entirely; I wander back in my reckoning among all of my own that have lived and died until I no longer remember where I am. And then I lift my head and look about me at the river and the valley, the great, unearned beauty of this place, and I feel the memoryless joy of a man risen from the grave.
– Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow
One: I got an email!!
Two: this quote is so entirely suitable and touching! Thank you
The excerpt from Wendell Berry is well chosen and especially poignant as the SSU community walks through this season of sorrow. Walter, I love the quote, and especially the way it concludes, because I too can “…feel the memoryless joy of a man risen from the grave.”