On Grief, Joy, Presence, and Absence

I spent the weekend helping our eldest daughter move back into her dorm for her senior year of college. She’s been reading a book she’s so excited about, and she really wanted me to know it. Realizing I had a 7-8 hour drive in front of me, not to mention a whole lot of emotion, because no matter how many times I leave our children, or they leave me, my heart wobbles between a slim and fuzzy tilt toward sorrow and the weightier and lengthier leaning of joy, I downloaded the book, Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, and sucked in 7 hours of words like an addict. Enjoy his words on grief and joy.
“The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone… This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.” Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow