We will all lose all we love.
Six years. That's how long my wife, Gretchen, lived with breast cancer.
Most of those years had a rhythm in the afternoons. The kids would come home from school and she would be on the couch, sometimes upright, sometimes not, depending on how the chemo was that week. She would ask each of them about the day. She wanted to know who had said what at lunch. She did this when she was so tired she could not stand without help, and she smiled at the answers, and the day would gather itself around her smile until it was almost an ordinary afternoon. I have a lot of memories from those years. That is the one I keep coming back to.
After she died, the mornings turned into long walks. A six-mile loop through the Park Cities in Dallas: front door, down University, through the SMU campus, onto the Katy Trail, and back along Armstrong. The world was carrying on. The loop carried me through it without asking me to be part of it.
The question came on the walks. Not the question people asked me. People asked, how are you. People asked, are you sleeping. The question was: how do you build a life after everything you built has been swept away.
I read what people read, and the question was still there when I closed the books. Wisdom may keep you safe, but it won't keep you warm. It would not sit beside me on the couch in the evening. It would not make a meal worth lingering over. I needed a wisdom with hands, with a chair, with bread on it, with enough room for grief and ordinary laughter in the same hour.
So I went back to a book I had read many times before, and I started reading it differently.
The book is Ecclesiastes, written about three thousand years ago by a writer who calls himself the Preacher. I'm a Christian, and for me it is a sacred book. I want to say that plainly, because what follows grows out of a particular text from a particular tradition. But Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest books in the Bible, and the strangeness is what makes it portable. It says things that make a Christian reader uncomfortable and things that make a non-Christian reader lean in. You don't have to share my source to find what follows useful. It is for anyone with a week in front of them.
What Ecclesiastes does is name the conditions of life so accurately that you stop arguing with them. Life is brief. The world goes on whether you do or not. Wisdom will help you, and wisdom will fail you. There is only one life, and you do not get to step outside it to check whether it is going well.
And then, in the middle of that hard honesty, the writer interrupts himself. He tells you to eat and drink. He tells you to be joyful and to do good while you live. I commend joy, he says, because this is what remains under the sun.
Out of those passages came a framework. It is small, and the smallness is the point. When a life comes apart, the enormous answer is more than anyone can carry. But bread is not too heavy. A walk is not too heavy. A chair at a table, a small good task, an honest gift, the choice to face joy for one more day: these are small enough to pick up. They are also, the Preacher insists, large enough to live by. There is, he says, nothing better.