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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.��

The Loved Ones

The loved ones we call the dead depart from us and for a while are absent. And then, as if called back by our love, they come near us again.
They enter our dreams. We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them. They are simply here, simply waiting while we are distracted among our obligations.
At last it comes to us: They live now in the permanent world. We are the absent ones.

Ken and Liz Dasher are heavily invested in jigsaw puzzles; all we need is a good playlist and nothing but time. And so it was, the second week of school – a puzzle of fall foliage and a playlist full of country music from my childhood. Everything was fine until George Strait started falling in love with Emmylou Hayes. “Check Yes or No” took me straight back to the second-row seats of my parent’s Ford Econoline van and my dad (who thought George could do absolutely no wrong) driving and singing every line from memory. Dad loved a story in a song, and he played songs loudly as he dropped me off at carpool.

I didn’t have to hear too many bars of that song before the tears came; two years later and the ache of losing my dad has a surprising rawness that still grips me.

A few days later, we lost Mr. Berry.

My Dad was born on “December fifth, nineteen and thirty-three” — the way he always said it — in Fort Kent, Maine. Mr. Berry was born 243 days later and more than 1200 miles away.

They were certainly different men, but of the same vintage; dutiful for real reasons, hard working for both the work’s sake and their own, and observant because that form of learning is practical. In the tenderest way, the loss of Mr. Berry felt akin to the loss of my dad.

I happened across this poem in the days after Mr. Berry’s death. I dissolved into tears again.

The Meeting

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
Ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

That specific George Strait-induced memory of my dad from late elementary school has lingered with me ever since. Marveling that I can both rejoice at his homegoing and freedom from earthly pain AND long for him next to me — singing, puzzling, laughing. Missing him, and yet somehow coming to understand that I am the absent one. Longing to be by his side, plucking a peach off a mighty fine tree.

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