Wendell's Words for Terry Read

These words of Wendell Berry have comforted me in the past and will do so again with the great loss of our very dear friend, Terry Read, pictured below with Sydney on the Washington State Ferry some years ago. It was taken during one of the many wonderful "free days" during our church reunion on Samish Island and the joy portrayed on both faces says a lot about the nature of this man. We all loved those memories and adventures on Lopez Island with the extended church family and our hearts go out to Linda and daughter Andrea, the two most cherished women in Terry's life. The words of Wendell seem so harsh at the beginning, but bring some peace at the end.

"What gets you is the knowledge, that sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think you ought to have asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.

And yet, their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don't live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead were alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other are the same. You can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know."
(Wendell Berry, Atlantic Monthly, 2008)