Author’s note: This is not predicated on any particular awareness of a pending expedited change in my mortality. It is not something of any urgency compelling me to write this. But as I near the 70 mark in a few weeks, one cannot help but wonder what those last few sparks of cerebral impulses will be like. If it involves an out-of-control bus, a wayward meteor, or large carnivore, I hope I am looking the other way. Let’s leave it there. And before anyone feels the need to tell me to find Jesus, I’ll save you the trouble. I looked to him in the past, and then I learned to read.
Ten
Something is lifting. Not leaving, lifting. The way fog doesn’t disappear but rises, becomes sky, becomes something you can no longer point to and name. I feel myself doing that. Becoming harder to point to.
Nine.
She is laughing on a beach. I don’t reach for the memory. It reaches for me. That is the difference now — I am no longer the one doing the reaching. Things are coming to collect me. Gently. Without urgency. The laughing woman on the beach has been waiting her whole life to be remembered this clearly.
Eight.
My mother’s faith. I used to think faith was something you reasoned your way out of. She knew better. Faith was something you learned. Something you carried, uncertain and imperfect, from one day to the next.
Seven.
There is a question I’ve been carrying since I was nine years old, standing in a church that smelled of candle smoke and old wood, looking up at a ceiling that was meant to suggest infinity and mostly succeeded. What is up there? The question is still with me. But it has changed shape. It is no longer anxious. It is almost playful. I am nine years old and the ceiling is opening.
Six.
The self—this careful construction of name and history and preference, this Joseph, this particular arrangement of stubbornness and love—is becoming porous. I can feel the edges of me going soft. Not dissolving. Opening. Like a hand that has been clenched a long time finally, finally relaxing.
Five.
My daughter at Christmas, running down the hall in footie pajamas. That sound. I want you to understan—that sound is not a memory. It is happening. Everything is happening. There is no was. There is only this enormous is.
Four.
I think of every prayer I ever said and wasn’t sure anyone heard. Not to any god; that fallacy left me long before. I think they were heard. Not answered the way I wanted, but received. The way a letter arrives and the person reading it understands more than the words. Something was always on the other end of that line. Listening. Patient beyond all reckoning. Waiting for me to run out of words and simply listen back.
Three.
The light is not metaphorical. I want to be precise about this. The light is not a figure of speech.
Two.
I am being recognized. That is the only word for it. The way you feel when someone across a crowded room sees you — really sees you—and their face opens. I am being seen, completely, without flinching, and what I feel is not judgment. What I feel is the relief of being known.
One.
The dark I feared my whole life was never truly dark. I understand that now. It was just the inside of a door.
And someone is opening it.
And there is so much light on the other side.
Zero.
For some, faith is a thing reasoned to.