I often find myself writing about death - its grasp, its hand in loss within family and among acquaintances. Deaths stop the world. Earthly tilt and daily rotation seem petty, the oceans' tides rude. 
            But today, this luminous October Sunday morning, the grasp of life is firm. A cloudless sky, the unblinking blue of autumn, melts through fire red and golden trees before it falls through the stained glass windows of our church. I've arrived late and sit in a back pew among the ushers in their suits and ID badges. 
            The crowd of worshippers is small, the sermon large: how we help one another navigate through suffering and how we tend to offer yackety-yak instead of supportive silences. The sermon is spoken by an eloquent woman, a visiting speaker to our church. I take notes in the margins of the bulletin because I cannot let words and phrases I admire escape. I am compelled to grasp them tightly and handle them for a while to get the feel of them. 
            Ahead of me in a sparsely occupied pew, a husband's arm lays outstretched toward his wife, his hand flat against her shoulder. Devotion animates the small muscles and posture of his hand, tenderness rests in his cheeks. The husband is Asian, young and fresh-skinned.
            The congregation grips its dozens of hymnals, rises, and sings. Standing reveals that his wife is expecting a baby. She is healthy slim; her condition resides only in her abdomen. I imagine a fetus in a womb, little fists clinched, grasping at the fullness and promise of a life these gentle parents seem dedicated to providing.
            This morning most congregants are like me, on the older side of our church population. Unlike the husband's firm muscles, ours droop, coffin-like, until we sing or greet one another. It is our history and wisdom, not our muscles, which grasp life and recompose our faces.
            I walk to my car, not caring how far away I've parked from church.  Sidewalks in this 100-year-old, tree-thick neighborhood shimmer in the light of brilliant autumn colors. Houses along the walk are each one different from the next.  Halloween decorations spread their way in all directions. Some displays are ambitious. Entire windows and doors, front yards and trees are handed over by their owners to the battlefield. Humor overcomes the skeletal doom of death.
            A van creeps along beneath an arbor of glowing yellows. Its driver, a young mother, grasps a caramel apple, munches into amber. She has managed three bites or so as she waits in front of the church for her passenger. I imagine I can hear the explosions of white and juicy into this dazzling day.

By Susan Myrick

Susan Myrick, retired from a career of teaching high school science, photography and cooking, relishes her precious leisure to pursue a passion for words and the need to use them. Writing has expanded her photographer's habit of capturing into stillness that which compels her to record and preserve. She finds that writing frees her from the tyrannies of time, chance and miserable human beings.

Susan's work has appeared in several volumes of Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies The Journal and Story Circle Journal as well as in two anthologies, Gifts from Our Grandmothers and Kitchen Table Stories. Her papers for the ninety-year-old literary club, The Winnetka Fortnightly, are stored in the Chicago history section of the Newberry Library in Chicago.