On the Shelf: Ordinary Grace

Ordinary Grace, a novel by William Kent Krueger, arrived in early December.  It came as the result of a blog mention by an unknown other that prompted enough interest on my end to bring it home to my shelf, with two additional copies sent on to loved ones after I'd read mine.  It opens and closes with the storyteller's thoughts on grace and death.

From the prologue:
It was a summer in which death, in visitation, assumed many forms.  You might think I remember that summer as tragic and I do but not completely so.  My father used to quote the Greek playwright, Aeschylus.  "He who learns must suffer.  And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." 

In the end maybe that's what the summer was about... I've come four decades since but I'm not sure that even now I fully understand.  I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer.  About the terrible price of wisdom.  The awful grace of God.

From the final pages:
I'm a teacher of history in a high school in Saint Paul and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is not such thing as a true event  We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.  Take the American Civil War.  The residents of the beleaguered Confederacy recounted a very different history from the one touted by the victorious Union.  It's the same with the history of a family.  Whenever we talk about New Bremen I'm aware that Jake [brother] and my father recall things I don't and what we remember together we often remember differently.  I'm sure that each of us has memories that for reasons our own we don't share.  Some things we prefer remain lost in the shadows of our past...And of that summer in which so much death occurred we hardly speak at all.

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 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 an 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.