What Love Leaves Alive
Love said to Death, “You may close the door, but you cannot command the house to forget the sound of footsteps.” And Death answered, “I have taken the voice from the room.” “Then the room shall remember,” said Love. “The chair shall remember the one who sat there. The table shall remember the hands that blessed the bread. The heart shall remember what it was taught before it knew it was learning.” For love is not the breath alone, nor the warmth of a hand, nor the name called across a familiar room. Love is also the courage that rises in us when we are afraid; the tenderness we offer because tenderness was once offered to us; the laughter that escapes in the very place where grief had made its home. The dead do not return to us as they were. They come as the patience we did not know we possessed, as the story we tell again, as the kindness we give without being asked, as a light passed from one life into another. And if the...
