Cracks
in the Heart
“You
will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be
badly broken, and the bad news is that you will never completely get
over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They
live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you
come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals
perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you
learn to dance with the limp.” Anne Lamott
I
will visit the family graves today. It's rather unnerving to go there
and see the names of my entire family carved in granite slabs. Dates
of birth, dates of death, nothing more. They cover a small hill in a
memorial cemetery with a beautiful view of mountains all around.
Confirmation that we live, we die—only our memory is left.
We've
talked about family a lot since I've been here—it's what you do
with cousins, recount the good-old, bad-old days. The characters in
your shared play come alive again, with all their color, their light
and their darkness. Thank God they have both, otherwise what sort of
dull stories would we tell? Oh, my father was a banker—he lived,
made money, died...that's it. Yawn. Much more fun to tell episodes of
my father, the hell-raiser, unpredictable, mad as a hatter, but also
kind, benevolent. I mean, where would Pat Conroy be without his crazy
father? Or, my mother, the strict one with the hickory-switch, who
made the best cornbread this side of heaven. We can sit around all
day and spin out stories of family trials and tribulations, and laugh
and laugh. We know only some of their stories, though. Not all, and
not who they really were in their heart of hearts. That's the
paradox, isn't it, that these people who gave us life, whose genes we
have carried and passed on to our children, are in many ways an
enigma, a mystery even to us.
The
family I know are the ones I carry in my heart—the heart that's
been broken repeatedly, that's sealed up improperly. Their stories
are my stories, their darkness, and their light reflect within me.
They broke my legs, my arms and, at times, my spirit, but they also
taught me how to dance with a limp.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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