After You Read

You have just read Looking for Relics.

This chapter holds two searches together. I was trying to discover whether I could continue alone in a world that had become unfamiliar to me. And I was returning to places and experiences from my life with Darrell, hoping they might give me something of that life back.

They did not give me back what I was looking for. But the journey showed me something else.

Afraid to Go On Alone

When my friends left Scotland, I was suddenly afraid. I pulled the covers over my head in the hotel and wondered whether staying in the UK alone had been a terrible mistake.

That fear startled me. I had taken people around the world before, even into places other people considered risky. Darrell had often been the one reeling me in. Now I had to remind myself of the woman who had done those things.

After what I called a fiery pep talk inside my bed-sheet cave, I got up and rented a five-speed, metallic-orange Mini.

I don't read that moment now as proof that I was brave or that I had overcome fear. I was afraid. And something I had known about myself was still available to me inside the fear. I could draw on enough of it to continue.

As I drove south, got lost, learned the roundabouts, found places on my own, and made decisions without Darrell beside me, I began to feel more capable. At the castle, an old recognition returned: It's you.

Looking for What Had Been

At the same time, I was looking backward. Hadrian's Wall held one of our unfinished jokes. George Fox's Pulpit held the memory of an experience that had once felt almost otherworldly. I went back wanting something I could not quite name.

At the wall, my attempt to shout freedom dissolved into rain, tears, sheep, and absurdity. At George Fox's Pulpit, the old feeling did not return. I stood there thinking, Well, this isn't it.

Looking for relics of us wasn't working.

What Relics Cannot Do

Looking back, I think I was asking the relics to do something objects and places cannot do: restore presence. I was not merely looking for evidence that our life together had happened. I was looking for some trace of its livingness - the sense that the relationship could still answer me, still unfold, still lead somewhere.

Instead, the relics could only point backward. They held memory, but not motion.

A meaningful object or place can preserve a moment, but it cannot preserve the possibilities that once extended from that moment. It cannot contain another conversation, an ordinary afternoon, an argument repaired, a plan changed, or the future we assumed would continue. The relic is real, but its reality is static.

I was grieving not only Darrell and the life we had lived. I was grieving an unwritten life - the things that had no relic because they had never gotten the chance to happen.

The Past Could Not Carry Me Forward

Perhaps that was part of my disappointment. The past could be gathered, but it could not carry me forward.

That did not make the past less precious. It did not require me to leave Darrell or our marriage behind. Memory could accompany whatever came next, but it could not substitute for a future.

There was also a quiet freedom hidden in that failure, although I could not have named it that way then. If no memorial could contain the future, I did not have to find my future among the relics.

The strange thing was that while the places failed to restore what had been, I was discovering that I could still move through the world. The strength I was gathering did not come from recovering the past. It came while I was living a life the past could not live for me.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

Is there something you have been asking a memory, place, or object to give back to you?