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This post is part of a broader series where Full Table contributors reflect on Wendell Berry’s work to celebrate his life and legacy. The list of reflections can be found here.��

Gratitude is necessary to make it through life. As we grow, sooner or later we learn that life is full of disappointment. We lose people we love. We experience suffering we did not expect. We face the uncertainty of what is still to come.

In Wendell Berry’s novel, Hannah Coulter, Hannah, the narrator, tells the story of her life, one filled with grief, but even more so, filled with gratitude. Set in the fictional Port William, a small farming town in Kentucky, Hannah speaks of the everyday things that fill her days: farming, cooking, gardening, mothering. Yet beneath the details of the ordinary lies a profound awareness of how thin the veil is between the temporal and eternal, between what is and what is to come.

Hannah’s mother dies when she is very young; Hannah is then widowed barely two years into her first marriage when her husband goes away to war. Later in life, she suffers a miscarriage, and after many years of marriage, she loses her second husband. As she grows older, her beloved Port William changes as she watches many of her neighbors and friends die, her children grow up and leave home, and what used to fill her life becomes a memory. Though Hannah endures great loss, her refrain remains: “it is entirely a gift.”

When I first read the novel, I too had experienced a great loss: my mother. And like Hannah says after her first husband dies, “I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.” Living in the absence of the dead. How do you go on living, truly living, when a piece of you dies? How do you put one foot in front of the other, knowing that you no longer have the hand that once guided those steps?

Gratitude. And this isn’t a Sunday School answer. Hannah experiences bitterness and regret. She knows what it is to grieve. But she never allows her loss to tell her story. If she had, her story would not tell the truth of her life; it would obscure what remains: beauty, hope, love, and the goodness found in the place to which she belongs.

Hannah has become a mentor to me, and I return to her story every couple of years. When I am tempted to be consumed by what I have lost or by fear of what is to come, she reminds me to live a life committed to place, family, and faith, to pause and take a walk on a worn trail, to notice what is still beautiful, and to remember what I have been given. She calls me to live life with eternity in mind, for like she says, “time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or it is Heaven…”

It is all a gift.

Disclaimer: The above article solely represents the views of the author and does not represent any endorsement or statement by the Academy. Read more here.