The other chair

"We love because he first loved us." — 1 John 4:19

The chair across from me at the kitchen table is empty this morning, the same as every morning for the past seven years. I do not move it. Some people would. Some people would push it in against the table or take it to another room or put a plant on it or find some way to make the emptiness useful. I leave it where it is. Earl sat in that chair for forty-seven years and the floor underneath it has a faint wear pattern from the way he pushed back after supper, and I am not interested in improving the arrangement.

It is not a shrine. I do not set a place for him or pretend he is coming through the door. He is not there and I know it every morning when I sit down with the coffee and the Bible and the house quiet around me. The chair is empty. The man who sat in it is gone. These are facts I have absorbed the way a person absorbs anything that is true and terrible and permanent. Slowly at first. Then all at once. Then slowly again, for as long as the living takes.

What I have not absorbed, and what I do not expect to absorb, is the size of what was here. Forty-seven years of meals at this table. Forty-seven years of coffee in the morning and the crossword puzzle on Sundays and the way he held the newspaper up in front of his face and read pieces of it out loud that he thought I should hear, whether I was listening or not. I was usually listening. He did not always know that.

The grief books say things about stages and timelines and moving forward. I have read some of them. They are not wrong, exactly. But they do not account for the chair. They do not account for the way love outlives the person, the way it does not diminish on schedule or rearrange itself into something tidy. It just stays. It stays the way the wear pattern stays in the floor, long after the weight that made it is gone.

I had a friend tell me, the first year, that I would learn to fill the space. I have not learned to fill the space. I have learned to sit with it. That may not sound like much, but it took me a long time, and I think it might be the braver thing.

Seven years. I still love him. The chair is still there. The morning is still good.

Lord, thank you for the love that does not end when the chair is empty.