She Calls Me By My Uncle's Name

She says it warmly. That is what nobody warns you about.

He comes in on a Tuesday with the shopping and she looks up from the chair by the window and her whole face opens, and she uses his uncle's name, and she is so pleased to see him. She is not confused in the way people imagine. She is delighted. It is only the name that has moved.

He has learned to say nothing. Early on he corrected her, twice, and watched something go across her face that he never wants to be the cause of again, so now he puts the bags down and kisses the top of her head and answers to a dead man's name and asks her if she wants the window open.

Here is the thing he does not say out loud in that room. He is being forgotten by the person who taught him his own name. She taught him to say it properly, with the vowels her mother gave her, and she is the last person alive who says it that way, and one of these Tuesdays she will not say it at all.

He has prayed. He wants that recorded, sitting there with a bag of shopping between his feet. He prayed in the beginning the way you pray at the beginning, with everything in it. He has prayed in the car outside. He has prayed the short ones, the ones that are just her name said twice, and one Tuesday he sat in that car and could not manage any words at all and simply sat there, which he suspects was the truest praying he has done all year.

And after church, a woman who loves his whole family said, softly and with real kindness: have you thought about fasting for your mum?

He said he would think about it. He has thought about very little else since. And underneath a sentence made entirely of love, what he heard was that after all of this there was still something he had not done, and that the forgetting might somehow be his to hold back.

If you are the one who answers to the wrong name every week, come and sit out here a while.

Let us not pretend this is small

Before anything gets said about God, let something get said about the size of this.

This is grief for somebody who is alive. There is no ceremony for that, no casserole arrives, there is no week off work, and it gets done in a chair beside a window with the shopping still to put away. People will tell you she is still in there. Sometimes that helps and sometimes it lands like a stone, and feeling both in the same afternoon is allowed.

And no, nothing on this page is going to hand you a technique.

You have not prayed this badly, and you are not being kept waiting while heaven listens for a better sentence. That is not a soft word offered to a tired man on a porch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying a whole hour of silence in a parked car into a place that language does not go.

The one who does not forget

There is a line in Isaiah spoken to people who were convinced they had been left off the list, and God answers it with His own hands.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:16

Graven. Not written and not noted. Cut in.

The people He said it to had just accused Him of forgetting them. He does not argue the point with an explanation. He shows them where their name is kept, and He keeps it somewhere it cannot fall out.

You are held in a memory that has never once slipped, and so is she. I am not offering that to make a Tuesday easier: it is what God says about His own hands (Isaiah 49:16), and it is His Spirit, and not this paragraph, who makes it something a man can put his weight on while he answers to the wrong name.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally holds a mind together?

What it is, kept small and kept honest

Fasting is not a payment. It is not leverage, it is not the missing piece, and it is not news carried up to a God who had not noticed what is happening in that chair. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and carries the shopping in on a Tuesday, turning toward God with nothing in his hands.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to build up to and nothing to finish. A plan is what would turn this back into a transaction, and your mother is not a transaction.

And here is a thing that gets said out loud rather than in a footnote, because it is heavier than the paragraph it sits in. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, or simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. And a person who is carrying somebody through an illness needs feeding, not one more thing taken off them. You are not further from God because your body has a limit. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once arrived in a smaller measure on account of what a body can do. Her care stays with her doctors, all of it, exactly as it is: nothing here is medicine and nothing here is a reason to change one thing about how she is looked after.

And if today is heavier than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a way around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.