Still loving what we cannot save
The only time I tried to hurt my brother—who was older, stronger and didn’t try to hurt me back because it would have been too easy—was in high school when he was living with our dad and I was living with our mom and he didn’t show up for a reconciliatory birthday dinner that my mother made for him. I found him leaving my dad’s apartment, dragged him down a flight of stairs, glanced a fist off his face and told him that he wasn’t my brother.
I’m thinking of that scene this morning after my two sons, Asa and Gabe, wrestled in our living room last night. Asa (the older) had taken Gabe’s notebook, and Gabe pinned him down to try to get it back. Laura and I looked on, refraining from jumping in, silently wondering whether the teasing and tussling was turning into something more dangerous.
An hour after they went to bed, the boys came downstairs, shuffling feet outside our room. I assumed that the fighting had continued into the night, but we came to learn that they had been lying in bed talking about missing school, friends, sports and especially childhood innocence, although they didn’t use that term. When Gabe started to cry upstairs, Asa tenderly, compassionately walked him downstairs to find parents who would help him hold his brother.
I walked them back up to their room. Asa let me rub his back without recoiling in teenage contempt. From his bed across the room, Gabe held my gaze, eyes tired and red but alert and almost beseeching.
I wish I were a poet and could put into proper words the depth of that exchange. Gabe didn’t seem to be attempting anything with his gaze—not asking for anything or communicating a particular emotion. It was a blank stare but unconscious of being so, entirely different from the look performed by a child locked in a playful staring contest. His eyes suggested where he was, who he was. They were attentive but not determined to take a stand; they were persistent but quietly so, holding my own gaze as an offering rather than challenge. He let himself be seen.
In those eyes, I saw an outer layer of anxiety settled into sorrow. Just below was something else—confidence maybe, or restrained hope, or acceptance. He was submitting to the loss of our normal lives, saying yes to new realities. He was bearing it all, with muted confidence and because there were no other options.
Those few seconds were pure gift. The gift was ambivalent—or better, a gift of ambivalence. I was sorry for all that my children were facing during this pandemic, which includes their own mortality. And I was gratified that they were facing it, pleased—I’m not sure that’s the right word, but I don’t know a better one—that they were experiencing some of the solemn freedom that comes from living with the knowledge of death.
He was submitting to the loss of our normal lives, saying yes to new realities.
This morning, thinking on these things, Wendell Berry’s poem “To My Children, Fearing for Them” rises to mind. I memorized it some years ago while walking the trail that passes through fields of fireweed between Holden Village and Monkey Bear Falls. It’s an ambivalent poem, a poem about ambivalence. It captures better than I can the painful gift of “loving what I cannot save.”
The poem begins with a statement of undeniable fact: “Terrors are to come.” Berry addresses his children directly, considering “what you will / Live through, or perish by”—all of which “eats at my heart.” He then describes the “pain of coming to see / what was done in blindness” and, more heart-wrenching still, of “loving what I cannot save.”
The poem suggests the piercing guilt of having bequeathed a world where environmental disasters, pandemics, human hunger, systemic injustices and an ugliness of landscapes and inscapes will become even more the norm. Our children must live in this broken world. The deepest pain lies in our inability to make things right, coupled with the anguished grief of still loving what we cannot save.
Still loving what we cannot save. That seems to characterize the particularly painful and essential vocation of parenthood. Yet I would bet there are analogues in every calling, every elemental commitment that we make to become people capable of good and needed change, even while realizing—not without grief—that even our most momentous efforts will not begin from or return us to scratch. We go on loving, working and grieving, sometimes fiercely.
I know the violence that comes by way of misdirected love and the vicious attempt to save what cannot be saved but only loved. I see it when I look at invasive medicine, interventionist foreign policies and domestic racialized violence. But I recognize it out there because I also see it here, in my own predilections to violence, which arise from and try to cover over my inability to bear what I cannot change.
When I pulled my brother down the stairs of my father’s apartment building, hitting him in the face, I did so because I couldn’t put the broken family I loved back together again. Living that brokenness was too painful to bear, so I thrashed about in the stairwell instead.
This excessively long time of COVID-19 seems too much to bear. Its gift to me is training in bearing it, endurance, long-suffering. It’s the gift of a spiritual education in saving what can be saved, in continuing to love all that we cannot and in discerning the difference between the two. It’s the gift of love between neighbors, once paternalism and protectionism are purged, and a hope that might yet rise like fireweed, growing from ashes.
This article is excerpted from Neighbor Love Through Fearful Days: Finding Purpose and Meaning in a Time of Crisis (Fortress Press, 2021) by Jason A. Mahn.
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