The Shades of Love

We will live here now. We cannot pull the colors apart.

I. 

It is late winter in South Bend, senior year. He is stretched across his twin bed, arms tucked behind his head. I am spinning in his roommate's desk chair. We laugh about some stupid story from last night’s party. The afternoon is sun-drenched, long shadows reaching through the window blinds in his apartment. As light slants through the shades, I suddenly realize that I want to spend the rest of my life like this. The two of us together. 

For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light. (Psalm 36:9)

II.

Clouds billow in the cobalt sky, the sunshine bright and warm on that Saturday afternoon, the summer play of shade and light. We are all smiles, all love. We lean on the softer sides of the vows: for better, for richer, in health. We will keep each other here: safe, healthy, secure.

My uncle has lent us his gleaming white Oldsmobile, and we wave to our families and friends as we pull away from the church. Driving through downtown, we see an elderly couple walking slowly into the restaurant on the corner. She is leaning on his arm; they are holding hands. We look at each other with sentimental smiles as we pass. That will be us one day.

The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand. (Psalm 121:5)

III.

Shadows fall even on summer evenings. The stories known only to two. The wear and tear of a long marriage. The darkening shades of distance and disillusion. The shadows of death, grief, depression, anxiety. We weather more than we ever wanted. A mercy not our own is the only reason we do not leave.

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
until the destroying storms pass by. (Psalm 57:1)

IV.

Shades haunt me, the creeping fears of mid-night when I worry my children will grow up motherless. Over months I become the shade: a specter of my former self. Hairless, shrunken, bruised and scarred. Like a Greek ghost, I inhabit an underworld, living in shadow. But never alone, even in the land of the sick. He bandages my wounds, injects my medicine, tends my ragged body. We witness resurrection, unfurling like spring. Me. Us. 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me. (Psalm 23:4)

V.

Our youngest children paint at the counter while I cook dinner. They play with color, mixing white or black with red to make it lighter or darker. Staring at the swirls, they bend their small heads together, one light-haired, one dark. Their peering faces are shades of our own, holograms that shift as they turn. 

This is the mystery of love’s many hues, how time and tragedy deepen the once-bright days. We will live in this shade now, the chiaroscuro. We cannot pull the colors apart. 

But there is beauty here, too—a richness, a depth, a ripening. You come home to me again, and you pull me close as the children shout and dinner bubbles over on the stove, both of us laughing with wrinkled eyes. You kiss me like we are twenty-one again, and in a flash everything shines full around us. What we need—in the dark, in the light—is here.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress;
my God, in whom I trust.’ (Psalm 91:1-2)

With gratitude to Katzie & Ben Photography for the photos they took last summer before I lost my hair to chemo