Evidence

The name of a poetry book jumped out at me as I browsed the shelves of the bookstore with my daughter.

Two of us, two women at the index of new chapters in our lives, wandered the aisles in search of titles. Signs to shout out new direction.

My girl just finished her master’s in Public Health. Her dream is to land in a job where she can care for those walking through Alzheimer’s. This disease has been a part of her life since she was ten years old, when my mother came to live with us.

A decade and a half later my daughter wanders these stacks with me, at the cusp of a new chapter in her life.

Awkwardly, I am in the same scenario, preparing for my next episode. My baby will graduate tomorrow. My three sons are married with their own lives. My ten years of caregiving are finished. I hope next stage includes sharing my own words. I wander through the children’s section, the place in a library where I first fell in love with words, turning page after page of illustrated stories and reading the small font in my mother’s textbook children’s anthology. As a mother and a teacher she gave me the gift of words, reading aloud, telling me stories. Even at the end, when the disease had stolen her strings of words, the few she spoke were treasures:

“Mahal Kita.” I love you, in Tagalog, her native language from the Philippines.

Milestones— graduations, weddings, funerals— uproot memories and reflection. So this day it is fitting to wander stacks of books and memoirs and verses and titles that name the chapters we have walked through—

grief, anguish, joy, laughter, song, caregiving, loss, growth, faith.

I find this title: Evidence.

A poetry book by Mary Oliver. And in her title poem, I drift through these words:

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But

            all beautiful things, inherently, have this function—

            to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory

            to the world, that good teacher.

I leaf through evidence of all we experienced these past years, eyewitnesses to the wonder of life rising to its fullest, to life in its sunset decline.

Each moment, each sorrow, each heartbreak, each spoken and forgotten word, each soft kiss on the cheek cast its own beauty, directing us to Glory.

I pray that you too will uncover Evidence of glory in your path, no matter how winding or unruly or straight or light or dark that path may be at this moment. I pray you will find Evidence of glory in the pain and the laughter. I pray your heart will receive the teaching this Evidence longs to give to you.

…Keep room in your heart for the unimaginable. (Mary Oliver)