Mercy, Understanding, Time to Grieve: The Gifts We Give Each Other

John and I have been married for two years. We made our vows to one another in the backyard standing on the dock. Immediate family attended, and a dear family friend officiated the ceremony. It was tender and beautiful, one of those moments in my life that felt wholly right and simultaneously, overwhelming. There are layers to any story, and mine has many. What I do want to say is that aside from the gift of my two children, John is the most gracious gift of my life. He means more to me than I have words to express.

Early on in our friendship, one of my favorite plates got broken. I had a set of eight, and that dinner set was a keepsake, a symbol of another life, a life I was reluctant to release, a life that felt whole and good, and mattered to me. John found a replacement for it, and bought a few extras. I sighed a big sigh, and clutched to my gorgeous Denby dinnerware even tighter.

When we married and I moved into the lake house, I hauled those plates and mugs and bowls into the kitchen like they were my third child. I had lost a great deal of emotional reserve, among other things, during my intercontinental move and could not handle the idea of losing my dishes. When I say I could not handle the idea, what I mean to say, is that the very thought of losing my dishes made my heart race and my throat close up. Those damn plates mattered to me.

The other day, in all the chaos and excitement of summer and kids swarming all over, Olive broke one of the beloved plates into a multitude of pieces.

I came into the kitchen and found the plate stacked on top of the kitchen table in a pile. I frowned and pulled a plastic bag from the pantry and placed the shattered chunks into it.

It was then that that I had the first thought: “I’m ready to get new plates,” I said to myself. “It’s time to let go of these.”

I threw the bag of broken plate into the garbage and kept going.

This weekend, John and I were on our own. We went to church Saturday night, and laid low all day Sunday. Late in the morning, I invited him to paddle board around the lake. We took Olive. She jumped from board to board, swimming in between us, I think in some kind of manic desire to herd. She likes to keep the group together.

We took our time, paddling over to spots we never see on the other side, and chatted freely. Toward the end, I prayed out loud over the lake, over our lives, and our dreams, over all the fears and heartbreaks, and asked God for mercy.

Mercy is the most beautiful word in the English language.

Much later, I made tuna fish sandwiches and set them on my plates. The plates I’ve had for my entire adult life. The ones I have clung to as a symbol of wholeness, the plates that mean my life is still together, not cracked and fallen apart. The plates that enfleshed the dream of a white-picket-fence-perfect-life.

We were eating in the kitchen when I told him. “I’m ready to get new plates. It’s time to let go of these.”

He was quiet. “It’s important to give one another a lot of understanding, isn’t it?”

I asked him to explain what he meant. “If I had pushed you, or made light of those plates when we first started talking, it would have hurt you. It’s important to give each other time to grieve the things that needed to be grieved.”

Time to grieve. Mercy. Understanding. Room.

The gifts we give each other.

John knew that if he had pushed me two years ago to get new plates, I’d have bolted. I’m not joking. When we first started talking I required a kind of gentleness very few people possess. But John understood. We get to the other side in our own time. The heart is a tender minefield of shattered dreams, secret hopes, and quiet pain. Push too hard and we shut down. Give people room to process, to accept their losses, to find beauty in ashes, and somehow or another, they find their way forward into the something new. Most of the time they find their way into something beautiful.

That afternoon, I looked up dinnerware on my phone and brought a few ideas to him. We sat in the living room and chatted about what we both might like to have.

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