Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundl… - Louise Erdrich

It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)

(BM: do you have an assured faith now?) LE: I go through a continual questioning. And I think that is my assurance that if I was to let go of my doubt, that I would somehow have surrendered my faith. My job is to address the mystery. My job is to doubt. My job is to keep searching, keep looking. When I think about my version of what a God is and I keep changing it, right now I think of this creator as a great artist, we don’t understand works of art when we see them. They’re—the greatest works of art are—we see them through a glass darkly. We don’t understand them. They’re very difficult for us to understand. So with this great work of art in which we’re all participating, this great artist has made beauty and terror and death and cruelty and humor and mystery part of who we are and commerce. And health care reform. Everything is part of this mystery.

I was not prepared to think of the people I had lost, or to speak of them, although we did, carefully, without letting their names loose in the wind that would reach their ears. We feared that they would hear us and never rest, come back out of pity for the loneliness we felt.