A DARE TO LIVE FULLY
RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE
one thousand gifts
ANN VOSKAMP
For the Farmer,
who tended and grew my soul
Contents
Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
A glowing sun-orb fills an August sky the day this story begins, the day I am born, the day I begin to live.
And I fill my mothers tearing ring of fire with my body emerging, virgin lungs searing with air of this earth and I enter the world like every person born enters the world: with clenched fists.
From the diameter of her fullness, I empty her outand she bleeds. Vernix-creased and squalling, I am held to the light.
Then they name me.
Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an e . Ann, a trio of curves and lines.
It means full of grace.
I havent been.
What does it mean to live full of grace? To live fully alive?
They wash my pasty skin and I breathe and I flail. I flail.
For decades, a life, I continue to flail and strive and come up so seemingly empty. I havent lived up to my christening.
Maybe in those first few years my life slowly opened, curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts God gives .
But of those years, I have no memories. They say memory jolts awake with traumas electricity. That would be the year I turned four. The year when blood pooled and my sister died and I, all of us, snapped shut to grace.
Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents stunned bending, I wonder if my mother had held me in those natal moments of naming like she held my sister in death.
In November light, I see my mother and father sitting on the back porch step rocking her swaddled body in their arms. I press my face to the kitchen window, the cold glass, and watch them, watch their lips move, not with sleep prayers, but with pleas for waking, whole and miraculous. It does not come. The police do. They fill out reports. Blood seeps through that blanket bound. I see that too, even now.
Memorys surge burns deep.
That staining of her blood scorches me, but less than the blister of seeing her uncovered, lying there. She had only toddled into the farm lane, wandering after a cat, and I can see the delivery truck driver sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and I remember how he sobbed that he had never seen her. But I still see her, and I cannot forget. Her body, fragile and small, crushed by a trucks load in our farmyard, blood soaking into the thirsty, track-beaten earth. Thats the moment the cosmos shifted, shattering any cupping of hands. I can still hear my mothers witnessing-scream, see my fathers eyes shot white through.
My parents dont press charges and they are farmers and they keep trying to breathe, keep the body moving to keep the soul from atrophying. Mama cries when she strings out the laundry. She holds my youngest baby sister, a mere three weeks old, to the breast, and I cant imagine how a woman only weeks fragile from the birth of her fourth child witnesses the blood-on-gravel death of her third child and she leaks milk for the babe and she leaks grief for the buried daughter. Dad tells us a thousand times the story after dinner, how her eyes were water-clear and without shores, how she held his neck when she hugged him and held on for dear life. We accept the day of her death as an accident. But an act allowed by God?
For years, my sister flashes through my nights, her body crumpled on gravel. Sometimes in dreams, I cradle her in the quilt Mama made for her, pale green with the hand-embroidered Humpty Dumpty and Little Bo Peep, and shes safely cocooned. I await her unfurling and the rebirth. Instead the earth opens wide and swallows her up.
At the graves precipice, our feet scuff dirt, and chunks of the firmament fall away. A clod of dirt hits the casket, shatters. Shatters over my little sister with the white-blonde hair, the little sister who teased me and laughed; and the way shed throw her head back and laugh, her milk-white cheeks dimpled right through with happiness, and Id scoop close all her belly-giggling life. They lay her gravestone flat into the earth, a black granite slab engraved with no dates, only the five letters of her name. Aimee. It means loved one. How she was. We had loved her. And with the laying of her gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.
Closed to any notion of grace.
Really, when you bury a childor when you just simply get up every day and live life rawyou murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins? Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away. Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?
My familymy dad, my mama, my brother and youngest sisterfor years, we all silently ask these questions. For years, we come up empty. And over the years, we fill againwith estrangement. We live with our hands clenched tight. What God once gave us on a day in November slashed deep. Who risks again?
Years later, I sit at one end of our brown plaid couch, my dad stretched out along its length. Worn from a day driving tractor, the sun beating and the wind blowing, he asks me to stroke his hair. I stroke from that cowlick of his and back, his hair ringed from the line of his cap. He closes his eyes. I ask questions that I never would if looking into them.
Did you ever used to go to church? Like a long time ago, Dad? Two neighboring families take turns picking me up, a Bible in hand and a dress ironed straight, for church services on Sunday mornings. Dad works.
Yeah, as a kid I went. Your grandmother had us go every Sunday, after milking was done. That was important to her.
I keep my eyes on his dark strands of hair running through my fingers. I knead out tangles.
But its not important to you now? The words barely whispered, hang.
He pushes up his plaid sleeves, shifts his head, his eyes still closed. Oh
I wait, hands combing, waiting for him to find the words for those feelings that dont fit neatly into the stiff ties, the starched collars, of sentences.
No, I guess not anymore. When Aimee died, I was done with all of that.
Scenes blast. I close my eyes; reel.
And, if there really is anybody up there, they sure were asleep at the wheel that day.
I dont say anything. The lump in my throat burns, this ember. I just stroke his hair. I try to sooth his pain. He finds more feelings. He stuffs them into words.
Why let a beautiful little girl die such a senseless, needless death? And she didnt just die. She was killed.
That word twists his face. I want to hold him till it doesnt hurt, make it all go away. His eyes remain closed, but hes shaking his head now, remembering all there was to say no to that hideous November day that branded our lives.
