All I’ve Got

I was working at my desk this afternoon when I heard Bluebelle whimper and fuss behind me. I looked back at her, followed her gaze, and saw a lovely young spike buck in the front yard, feeding on whatever caught his liquid brown eye. I watched him for a bit, took a few pictures, and then sat back down. When I looked up again, the buck was gone. He lives with a fully-grown six-pointer, two does, and a fawn in the woods behind our house.

It is a never-fading wonder to watch such lithe, muscular beauty move through my world in such an unself-conscious way. And I am grateful.

***

In the course of my duties, I spoke to an elderly man who is taking care of his elderly girlfriend (his word, not mine) as she fades into the sepia world of dementia. He described the steady increase of sundowner’s syndrome, and his inability to get sufficient sleep at night for fear that she is escaping their apartment, and he talked of how she is now a stranger to him.

“But she’s all I’ve got. And I’m all she’s got. So here we are.”

He also told me of their elderly little dog, now blind and deaf, whom he hand-feeds five times daily, and how the dog sits on his girlfriend’s lap and glows under her caresses though he can no longer see her nor hear her coos.

“No one will help us,” he said at the end of our conversation.

And how can I say to such a man, “Be warmed, be fed?” All my life, I’ve been told that if I walk in the ways of the Lord, He will give me the desires of my heart.

My desire is to help such people, but I have not the resources. Nor do I have the temperament or the inclination to be a fund-raiser. This leaves me in the position of nightly praying for my own prayers. Interceding for the efficacy of my own intercessions.

Will there ever come a day when there are clear answers, on the other side of this life? I do hope so. I hope so much that there will be. I do so hope that the next life will not be a misty, theoretical, abstract existence. I would rather be a sightless, soundless dog on the lap of an impoverished nobody than to find Paradise to be a sanctified clinical trial of some sort.  God forbid.

God forbid. I would rather be a hungry, pursued deer, forever wary and unable to rest, with a lifespan of a mere year or two, than to have some disassociated, oblique, ultimately extinguished existence on the other side of this steep mountain.

Faith, where is thy rigor? Trust, where is thy sure footing?

~ S.K. Orr