Monday, May 18, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Do not go gentle …
We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.
Don my Italian buddy called, asked about me. He hadn’t heard anything for awhile. Other friends sometimes call, or text … are you OK?
Well, not exactly OK these days. Today, for example. But on the other hand, I’m full of poetry and lyrics and memories. So much all at once …
Margaret and I watched a couple of movies about amnesia last week. Everything seems OFF to Cary Grant, or Gregory Peck or Humphrey Bogart, and always – danger lurks around the next corner.  I noticed  the Matrix movies are on Roku’s HOWDY. No ads. Tempting. But right now … I think I’ll skip them all for a bit. Too much fictional confusion for my already cloudy brain.
I have heard of the Holy Spirit, and boy am I grateful to be resting in her arms.
Before Shawn and I talked last week I knew how important Wendell Berry’s characters had become to me. And when I searched a decade of devotions and sat at the computer finding a way to pull them together into one document for Shawn, I realized that God has been beating this drum inside me for awhile.
This was Berry’s seventh novel. He farmed, he taught at UK, etc. But as I read this story again tonight, it feels so darn personal.
My friend Dave, an LCC classmate of Margaret’s in the 70’s and before that a Purple Heart/Bronze Star decorated Vietnam veteran, put his arm around me this morning.
“Hey, I just want to pray for you. Let’s pray for each other. And I just wanted to tell you that a friend told me how you prayed for me last week in class. Crying. It helped. I’m going to go again tomorrow, and cry some more.”
Course I kind of lost it in that prayer a week ago, asking for those 70 people to pray for him. They mostly all knew him; he’s been an usher there for a few decades. But I got to what mattered: please God, help Dave … CRY.
Sob and sob and sob. Margaret has been saying lately. “I need to spend about three hours crying.” She pulls fresh herbs off the plants she found at HEB and Trader Joe’s, now just right there outside on the patio. She builds beautiful plates of salmon and braised brussels sprouts and carefully curated rice … just a  few hours ago she made sabbath supper for Shannon and me. We watched the end of The Glass-Bottomed Boat, and she went to bed. We smiled at each other. We kissed. The catharsis will come when it comes.
And I know it will for me too. I lie in bed, my back stronger now, curled up inside a factory-made southwestern Navajo quilt. The monks are singing 13th century chants from my 21st century Alexa.
And there is no trying, or willing, or deciding about this. This is above all not up to me. Metaphors abound. Ferlinghetti calls it the “rebirth of wonder.”  I can know about it, but lately I’ve begun to get a taste of what it IS.
And … these scenes from Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry pour over me tonight …I don’t have the terminal diagnosis, but really, this collapse of defenses is not exactly about physical death, more about a deeper surrender than I can make happen on my own. And it feels like everybody’s story if we can just give God permission to let us get there …
Nathan was sick, and he knew it, he knew it better than I thought he did, a long time before he consented to go to the doctor. He was wearing out, he said, but he wasn’t only wearing out, he was sick. He lost weight and strength. He got bony and hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. You could see his skull behind his face. He felt bad. He was often almost too ill to get out of bed. But he kept on in his old way, quiet, more pleasant even than usual, staying busy off someplace, mostly by himself. Margaret and Lyda and I were after him all the time. “Go to the doctor. You have got to go to the doctor.”
And Nathan would say, “I’m wearing out. It had to happen, you know.” He was not a doctor-going man. Danny was the only one who did not insist. He just smiled his smile. It wasn’t Burley’s smile, for there was no sass in it. It was just the smile by which he kept what he knew to himself. I don’t think anybody has ever asked Danny, “What are you smiling about?”
Finally we just made Nathan go to the doctor. Margaret and I took him to Hargrave. Our doctor there sent him to a specialist in Louisville. The specialist sent him for tests. And so on. Nathan submitted to it all with patience and quietness, even with good humor, knowing, I think, the diagnosis already. The diagnosis was cancer, dangerously advanced and spreading, inoperable.
The doctor spoke to Margaret and me, to avoid looking at Nathan. He went into the technical details, speaking of metastasis and naming organs. But Nathan was looking at him with a straight, open-eyed look, and the doctor finally felt it. He made himself look back at Nathan, and it was to his credit. Nathan said, “Say what you mean. It’s all right.”
“Mr. Coulter,” the doctor said, “you are gravely ill, or you soon will be. The prognosis is not good, but without prompt treatment you certainly will not live long.” Without changing his look or his expression, Nathan nodded. The doctor went on to prescribe an intensive course of therapy, starting with radiation. It was a story we all knew, one that has been lived and told too many times in Port William, a bad story.
But I was surprised when Nathan, without exactly interrupting, stood up. He had come to the end of his submission, though not of his patience or his quietness. He put out his hand, which the doctor a little wonderingly shook. Nathan said, “Thank you, doctor. Thank you for all you’ve done.” He went out, and Margaret and I, having no choice, followed. I knew then what he had been doing. For a good while after he got sick, he thought he would just work it off the way he always had, he would get well. And then the truth came to him, and he faced it.
After that, he was loitering, putting us off, giving himself a chance to be captured by his death before he could be captured by the doctors and the hospitals and the treatments and the tests and the rest of it.
When he consented to go to the doctor he was only consenting for the rest of us to be told what he already knew. He was dying. We parted with Margaret, who had met us at the doctor’s office. We went home. Nathan hung up his suit, which he would not wear again alive, and got back into his work clothes. He walked up to the barn, and I heard him start the tractor. He put out hay for the cows. It was February, they would be calving soon, and I knew he would look at every one of them. He did his other chores. He filled the woodbox on the back porch. He built up the fires for the evening. And then he sat down in his chair by the stove in the kitchen and picked up the newspaper.
I was working at the counter by the sink, not daring to turn around. I was brokenhearted, furious, scared, and confused, crying, and determined not to let him see that I was. I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. Why I had started making a cake, I don’t know. It was what my hands had found to do, and I was doing it. And was Nathan sitting over there actually reading the paper? Well, I knew he was holding it up and looking at it. For all I know, he may have been reading it. But I knew too that he was thinking of me.
My steadfast comfort for fifty years and more had been to know that I was on his mind. Whatever was happening between us, I knew I was on his mind, and that was where I wanted to be. He was thinking of me, I was sure of that, but he had got ahead of me too. He had dealt with what the doctor had told us even before he had gone to the doctor. And now, in a way too late, I was having to deal with it. Looking back, I can see there was something ridiculous about it. There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing. Nathan had seen that. For my sake as much as his own, he was insisting on it.
But I was too upset to see it then. My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, “Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?”
I couldn’t turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, “Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.” He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate. He lived right on.
The next morning after breakfast, with the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen windows, we sat on at the table a long time, talking of a number of things, practical things. We set our life before us as it was, and set ourselves before our life as we were, talking of what needed to be done, as we had talked many times. And then Nathan changed the tune.
Looking straight at me, much as he had looked at the doctor the day before, and taking up that subject again, he said, “I have had a good life, especially the part you know. I have liked it and am thankful for it. I don’t want to end up as a carcass for a bunch of carrion crows, each one taking his piece, and nobody in charge. I don’t want to be worn all to holes like an old shirt no good for rags.” I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn’t want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his own life. He didn’t want his death to be the end of a technological process. I nodded. He said, “I’m asking this of you, Hannah. I know it’s a lot to ask. I’m sorry.” … As the opportunities came, I talked with Margaret and Lyda. We tried to foresee needs and make plans. We went back, the three of us, to our doctor down at Hargrave. “He doesn’t want to die of a cure,” I said. The doctor didn’t want to comment on that…
Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came. Margaret came out more often than before, but she made her visits casual and not too long. Caleb came when he could. And Danny, I noticed, began showing up every day, maybe not stopping by the house, maybe not seeing Nathan, but keeping an eye on us, watching for what needed to be done and trying to get it done before it could worry Nathan …
One day, sort of laughing, he said, “Hannah, I’d go to the barn and see to things, but I’m afraid if I got there I couldn’t get back.”
 It was April by then, a sunny morning and warm out. I said, “Well, why don’t you go out on the porch and sit a while in the sun?” He went out, and I called Danny to come and see to things at the barn.
 The time soon came when he could not get out of bed. Lyda or Danny began staying at night during the week, Margaret on the weekends. And still Nathan would take the pain medicine only at night. He lay there in the daytime lucidly suffering.
Way in the night I heard him stir and cry out, not loudly. I got up to see about him. I said, “Do you need anything?” “No,” he said.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” But I sat down in a chair by the bed.
The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder.
He said, “I love you too, Hannah.”
 He didn’t last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went …
Hannah’s story continues, and then she speaks quietly to us about one more moment with her husband.
 I am standing at the gate. Nathan has been salting the cattle down at the edge of the woods below the spring. Now he is walking back up the hill toward the house, toward me. He is walking in his thoughtful way with the salt bucket on his arm, looking around. He is whistling, as I know, over and over a piece of some old tune that will have the rhythm both of itself and of his breath.
 I am watching him, but he has not yet seen me. And now he sees me. The expression on his face does not change, but now his intention has changed, he is walking toward me and nothing else. As he comes closer he smiles a little, still whistling. I know that when he comes to where I am he will give me a hug, and I want him to. I know how it is going to feel, the entire touch of him. He looks at me with a look I know. The shiver of the altogether given passes over me from head to foot.
 (Acts 19, Psalm 68, Colossians 3, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
