Is it a curse? Or a blessing? I’ve been pondering this question for years, ever since I first heard in high school the expression “No pain, no gain.” Or maybe it was when I eyed a similar expression (my first experience of chiasmus?) in the notice tacked up on the wall of my high school boys’ locker room as we headed out for football practice or a game: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
During the years I was writing the pages of Sister Zero, I was also teaching myself to do mosaic tiling. With each little project—covering a wooden box, a mirror frame, a clay pot—I learned from small successes and big mistakes. (Plus, smashing china plates can be very cathartic!)
When our son died, I was struck by a phrase my wife repeated both shortly after his death and in the nearly five years since: “Where are you, Daniel?” We need to imagine a somewhere for those we love. I think, in part, that need is connected to our greatest fear—that those we love simply disappear without a trace as time passes.
How do we render onto paper not what we hear but what we cannot hear? What is the story for what we do not know? I believe we look for it in doubt, fear, and uncertainty.
I believe we experience that mystery in the questions, and not the answers, the silence and not the noise.
Three Decembers ago, during the first week of Advent, I took my kids on a weekend trip to see their grandmother and my aunt and uncle. My aunt and uncle care for my grandmother, who was ninety-three at the time, and had recently started to lose her ability to speak.
This is my third time through a book I’ve admired since I first read it during my twenties and then reread it, with equal admiration, in my forties: Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1905). And now, near eighty, I’m reading and admiring it again.