The Light of Grief and Grace

Hannah Coulter Contemplates Time

Truth be told, I hate summer. There are aspects of summer that I enjoy: sleeping in, leisurely mornings, hours by the pool, and blueberry pie. But I would trade it all for a moment of October. I was made for steaming mugs, cozy blankets, and roaring fires. Beyond that, is the problem of light. I wait for the moment the light begins to change. In the fall, there is always something new: now amber, now ashen, the light weaves among the changing trees. But in the summer the light is flat and bright, and there is a crushing sense of inescapable sameness.

This sense of sameness is, at its core, grief. There is a feeling of being stuck in the absolute wrong kind of changelessness. In the summer, I am reminded that time is all wrong. Time is created, and I was meant for the eternal. Philosophers of the ages have tried to understand time; to best understand maybe we just need a story.

Berry’s stories are unflinching tales of the beauty and tragedy of timeless souls in a finite world. It should be hard to bear, but the characters welcome me to their porch rockers to tell me a story. Among them, Hannah Coulter is the woman that I wish I knew. As my hair turns grey, I look ahead - how do I finish well? I see many examples of aging badly - some expected, many not. She is a pattern for me, an ideal type. I watch her and think, “This is how I hope to age.” She finishes life with gratitude, writing her benediction: “This is my story, my giving of thanks.”

The ubiquitous woman at the grocery checkout line says (always at the worst possible moment), “Enjoy it! It goes by so fast…” She is part sage, part liar - the years are fast, but the days are long. A day of teaching a child to read or use the potty is a thousand lifetimes; yesterday my oldest was a newborn and now his voice is beginning to change. Hannah’s thanks are two-fold, accepting both the days and the years.

The days in Port William were not easy. When reading Wendell Berry, my prevailing contemplation is how much time the women spent making biscuits. How were they not crushed by the days’ sameness? As best I can tell, they took pleasure in the work and the work had meaning because it was given. Hannah doesn’t make biscuits as an isolated act but as part of a liturgy of life. Though Protestants killed the liturgy of the church, the rural agrarian south still had a liturgy of place. Their lives were ordered by the limitations of time and the land. These are not only a source of grief, but also a means of grace. The writer of Ecclesiastes states, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.”¹

Hannah accepts the days, whether workdays or feast days. She describes the preparations for her first Christmas with her new in-laws, the Feltners:

We cooked for a week - Nettie Banion, the Feltner’s cook, and Mrs. Feltner and I. We made cookies and candy, some for ourselves, some to give away. We made a fruit cake, a pecan cake, and a jam cake. Mr. Feltner went to the smokehouse and brought in an old ham, which we boiled and then baked. We made criss-crosses in the fat on top, finishing it off with a glaze, and then put one clove exactly in the center of each square. We talked no end, of course, and joked and laughed. And I couldn’t help going often to the pantry to look at what we had done and admire it, for these Christmas doings ran far ahead of any I had known before.²

The craft of your work matters when it means something and you do not work alone. When there are five places to buy biscuits within jogging distance of my house, does anyone care how good my biscuits are? Or if I make them at all? There is a grace in the necessity of work.

Just as she accepted the work of her days, she also accepted the hardships of her years. Grandmam, who raised and prepared her, was her pattern, letting the years be what they were, not grasping for the past.

Grandmam was still proud of the narrowness of her waist when she was a young woman. When she married, she said, her waist had been so small that my grandfather could almost encircle it with his two hands. How, after all her years of bearing of mothering and hard work, she had grown thick and slow, and she remembered her lost suppleness and beauty with affection but without grief. She didn’t grieve over herself.³

Grandmam had a rightly ordered relationship with time that she passed on to Hannah, who leaves us with her parting wisdom: the distinction between hope and expectation.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you musn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.⁴

When my children were babies, and I cleaned them after an unusually foul diaper event, I would remember parents with wayward children. There are no guarantees. Families fracture. Children fail. Time is a created and fallen thing, a grief. But where there is grief, there shines grace. Sometimes grace is a story, changing the light and helping us to see the way.

1. Ecclesiastes 2:24.

2. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 36.

3. Ibid, 10.

4. Ibid, 146.