Tender Grace Read Online Free

feet. It instantly reminded me of another Tennyson poem, “Break, Break, Break.”
    Like “Tears, Idle Tears,” with its haunting last line, “O death in life, the days that are no more,” this poem also speaks of the helpless misery of loss. In college I couldn’t fathom the kind of anguish his words suggest. But in the first month or two after Tom’s death, before I declared a complete moratorium on reading, I pulled my English literature anthology off a shelf and let Tennyson’s lines speak for me:
    But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
    How easy Tennyson is to memorize:
    Break, break, break,
At the foot of the crags, O Sea!
    But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
    I spent quite some time with the Homer painting. I left it finally to take a lunch break, rummaging in my purse for an apple while I searched for a private bench where I could hide out and stare into space.
    I looked for the sculpture everywhere I went this afternoon and thought I’d surely find it in the Native American room. When I didn’t, I was so disappointed that I did something very unlike me, at least at this point in my life: I asked about it. I was so pleased when the lady said they still had it and directed me to the library reading room.
    And there he stood, just as I remembered him.
    He is a young Indian, exuding dignity. His hair in simple braids, he wears what appears to be buckskin pants with some kind of loincloth over them. He is looking up, and his arms are outstretched beside him, palms up. The work of artist Charles H. Humphriss, the sculpture is called Appeal to the Great Spirit.
    Like before, I did not want to leave.
    Unlike before, I felt suffocated by the desire for Tom to meet me there.

four
    August 11
    I took my sweet time getting around this morning before I left for Oklahoma City. I knew I didn’t have far to drive, hardly two hours, so I didn’t remove the Privacy Please sign on the door of my room until checkout time forced me to leave at noon.
    Just before ten I had gone down to the breakfast room and grabbed breakfast and lunch. When I had eaten my pastry and tidied the room, I plopped myself on the plump comforter, settled myself into the bevy of pillows propped against the headboard, and reached for the remote. In my peripheral vision, however, I saw Tom’s Bible sitting next to my suitcase.
    When had I brought it in?
    I don’t know why I’ve refused to read even the Bible for so long. Or why this morning I still hesitated, why I had to say to myself, “ Do this.”
    After such a hiatus, what to read?
    I thought about opening it and reading whatever my finger landed on. People do that, you know. But instead I opened to the place Tom had marked with the card I gave him on our twenty-fifth anniversary, the first chapter of John. He had been taking our small group through John on Sunday nights. I settled back, thinking I’d read a chapter. A few verses into it I realized that a chapter was way too much for this shrunken spirit of mine. I ended up reading only a few of the verses Tom had highlighted in chapter one.
    In them Jesus is called life and light .
    Maybe I should begin calling him those things, my antithesis: dear Life, dear Light.
    I usually call God my Father , because as these verses say, I am a “child of God.” I have not forgotten that. My lostness is emotional, not spiritual. It is my earthbound existence that is in jeopardy. There are spiritual implications, of course. My choosing “death in life,” however unwittingly, seems worse than ingratitude; it seems a betrayal of Life and Light.
    And I wonder, Will he come to the likes of me?
    The answer comes to me, an echo of the words I offered the kids mere days ago: “I am with you always.”

    I needed a Coke break, which required an ice run. While ice tumbled into my little plastic bucket, I thought about another verse I read this morning: “From the fullness of his