William Krueger: Ordinary Grace

We stand the three of us where an important part of our lives lies buried. We can see the river brown with silt and on the far side the patchwork of fields and beyond them the wooded hills that long ago channeled the glacial flood of the River Warren. The sun is low in the sky and the light is pollen yellow and the afternoon is blessedly still.

“It’s been a good day,” my father says with satisfaction. “It’s been a good life.”

In the way he did as a child whenever my father finished a sermon, Jake whispers, “Amen.”

Me, I throw an arm around each of them and suggest, “Let’s go have a beer.”

We turn, three men bound by love, by history, by circumstance, and most certainly by the awful grace of God, and together walk a narrow lane where headstones press close all around, reminding me gently of Warren Redstone’s parting wisdom, which I understand now. The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.