The Unbroken Circle

A perfect life lives forever.

The perfect life is one that lives forever. I don’t mean mine. I am too selfish and weak to want it for myself. If I could hold the wishes of the world in my hand and blow a thousand kisses into the wind and scatter them like dandelion seeds, I would wish for it with the burning passion of a hundred suns. I wish it because I am selfish and weak, and I know the weight of the emptiness is too heavy for someone with a searching heart. Because I cannot see a world without the love embodied in my loves. I do not want to exist in that world.

It is a world held together with grief and an endless search for lost love.

Author, critic, and playwright Terry Teachout lost his wife, Hilary, after her failed organ transplant in 2020. He wrote about his life on his blog at The Arts Journal, “About Last Night.” The weight of this loss was unmistakable. You could see the ache in his eyes written in every word and you wished the pain of it wasn’t real because you knew, someday, it would be your pain, too. But Terry found mercy — and grace and love — in the end.

Teachout and his companion, Cheril Mulligan (from his X account)

His entry on Dec. 31, 2021:

Hilary and I used to spend two or three weeks each winter on Florida’s Sanibel Island, our favorite place in the world. Alas, her deteriorating health caught up with her at last, and the doctors made her stop going there in 2016. It was always our plan to return as soon as she recovered from her double lung transplant. Instead, I lost Hilary and went straight from her deathbed into lockdown, after which I spent a painful year and a half learning to cope with that which I had most feared.

Then, six months ago, Cheril Mulligan and I fell in love, and though I’ll always miss Hilary, my life is once again full and joyous. One of these days I’ll take Cheril down to Sanibel—I know she’ll love it—but for now I’m more than content to live in the present and revel in the return of good fortune to my once-charmed, twice-blessed life.

I don’t need to know what’s to come next, which is a blessing, since it’s not given to any of us to know that. The only thing I know is that more surprises await me in 2022. Such being the case, allow me to quote Ogden Nash, as is my longstanding custom on the last day of the year:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.

Tonight’s December Thirty-First,
Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

If, like me, you have a sneaking suspicion that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, then I hope the year to come treats you not unkindly, and that your lives, like mine, will be warmed by hope and filled with love—and if you feel otherwise, then I wish for you the very same thing. We all deserve to be loved on New Year’s Eve.

Terry Teachout died 14 days later.

It is the cruelty of life that we want the love-filled days to last forever — we wish for it even as the weight of a ticking clock counts the price of our minutes and hours. But they pass too quickly in those moments when we shut our eyes against the sun. Then, we get our wish. The longest days, when we repay the clock one thousand times over, are the grief-filled days, and we wish for nothing but for the day to end. For mercy, at last.

Before that, there is a world shining with the high, bright sun. A world where plans and promises are made for a future where the world exists as it does right now: all the pieces are where they should be when we go to work in the morning and when we return home at night. And we want to believe this will never end because to consider alternatives is to invite the alternative no one wants, the hard one, the impossible one. I don’t want it. I want the easy one even though the hard grief-stricken one is inevitable — it is the shadow at my heel created by the high, bright sun.

Our eyes do this funny thing when we stare at the sun too long — images burn inside our minds when we shut our eyes against it. For a moment, those images live inside us.

Then life hits you harder than you want, and you see everything tilt sideways and slide even as you desperately try to push against the moments that come faster and more raw. If you could only just keep your footing for one minute or catch your breath, you keep thinking — there’s a chance. But no, it’s too much, too strong, and you can’t seem to wedge your shoulder against its cascading weight.

Things start to break and fall. One by one, slowly at first, then all at once, the pieces crumble everywhere. Instead of holding up the remaining pieces, you’re simply trying to dodge the torpedoes aimed at your soul — trying not to be swept away by the chaos around you.

“The Life Line” Winslow Homer, 1884

In his 1961 book A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes, “The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.”

The only thing left is to shut your eyes against everything until the chaos outside your mind stops. And you’re alone with the memories of a thousand days contained in glass. It’s so easy to scroll away. It's not like sitting with the pages of pictures tucked in the pockets of plastic sleeves where your fingers can gaze longingly at the faces looking back.

They were so deliberate. These memories of people and things we believed would live forever, even if just on a four-by-six rectangle with names scrawled in fading ink: in cursive, a date, a place.

Then, there came a time when you couldn’t shut your eyes against life because it was no longer yours. And you accept that the faces you once thought would never fade become ghosts, tiptoeing in on an evening breeze, a reflection out of the corner of your eye, in the smell of an open closet door, a pillow, or an old sweater.

So, you return to old pictures to fill in the space memory refuses to give back. And you find both the memories you held onto and the images you look at are clunky and flat compared to the feeling of life you can never have back. All the words, plans, and promises you made are ugly now. Blasphemous. Cavalier. Foolish. But you’d give the world away to be such a fool again. Just once more. Stare at the sun and never look away.

“Morning Sun” Edward Hopper, 1952

But we don’t live like that. We ignore the clock. We take for granted the order of the world and that plans will be fulfilled and promises always kept. We try not to consider the alternative ending that love can never turn into pain.

This week has been one of broken promises. My dog, Stella, died a week ago. My dearest friend, my 10-year companion, the unquestioning, loyal, stubborn, goofy rescue who was as tough as any 16-pound mutt could be. She defied the odds of having a heart murmur and diabetes and being blind and deaf and having a mouth full of the snaggiest of snaggle teeth an ugly little terrier mix could have. She was perfect. And those 10 years passed in the blink of an eye and I wanted those final hours of the final day to never end.

The mourning for the life ahead without her is here. But this isn’t new. Every loss brings pain, but every loss doesn’t hurt like the one before. I don’t own the pain of my father-in-law’s death. It’s sacred to my husband and his brother. But I mourn the man that I knew as the man who raised the man I love. And I grieve for our kids who are robbed of a grandfather who would have loved them with a fierceness and joy that I only see in the pictures of him together with my husband as a kid. The charming smile, the demanding stance, the easy humor.

And then there is the boy who whispered to me in the night. The little boy I will never hold in my arms or kiss his tiny hands. The boy I named in my dreams and made promises and plans with. The boy who could have saved me, once again, from myself.

This is a week of pain and loss and knowing a world I did not want to know. A world I want to shut my eyes to. I tried to stare at the sun forever and live with the memories made and yet to be made that contain all those things that make us laugh and shout and stand in awed wonder. But no one can live there. That world does not exist. The sun rises and shines high and bright. And it sets.

A perfect life is the one that lives forever. They will outlive us through love or stay with us in pain. Except the pain reflects the depth of undying love.

This is my Valentine to the pain, the grief, and the loss. They remind us of all we had and held and dreamed about and saw in our minds when we shut our eyes against the sun. This is for Stella, for Rick, and for the Boy.

---

I don’t know of any traditional Valentine’s Day songs, but I thought I’d share a simple Christian hymn written in 1907 that embraces loss and offers the comfort of hope in undying love. Many of you will recognize it through many decades of covers by artists from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan to The Youngbloods, Gregg Allman, and Richie Havens. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

There are loved ones in the glory

Whose dear forms you often miss.

When you close your earthly story,

Will you join them in their bliss?

Will the circle be unbroken

By and by, by and by?

Is a better home awaiting

In the sky, in the sky?

In the joyous days of childhood

Oft they told of wondrous love

Pointed to the dying Saviour;

Now they dwell with Him above.

You remember songs of heaven

Which you sang with childish voice.

Do you love the hymns they taught you,

Or are songs of earth your choice?

You can picture happy gath'rings

Round the fireside long ago,

And you think of tearful partings

When they left you here below.

One by one their seats were emptied.

One by one they went away.

Now the family is parted.

Will it be complete one day?

This is my favorite version, by Mississippi John Hurt:

Happy Valentine’s Day

Sincerely, Jenna