Vox Meditantis

You ask me what gives direction to my life. You set before me this question as though it were a simple thing, a thing I might answer with the ease of reciting scripture or naming the hours of prayer. And perhaps, one week past, I might have done so. I might have said: God. My husband. The keeping of a good house. The hope of children.

The hope of children.

I cannot hold my pen without my hand recalling another shape. A weight. The specific and particular weight of him, no greater than a loaf set fresh from the oven, but warmer, and mine. They placed him in my arms before they took him, and I want you to understand this, whoever you are that reads these words. I want you to carry it with you as I must carry it. He was held. However briefly this world claimed him and then surrendered him back to God, he was held. My arms were his first country. I was his entire world, and he was held in it, and that is something no death can reach back and undo. That is a thing sealed and finished and perfect, like a word already spoken.

So. Direction.

I find I cannot answer your question as I was taught to answer it. I cannot give you the ordered, dutiful response. The chaplain would have me say my direction is Heavenward, and perhaps it is, perhaps it shall be again, but today my direction is simply forward. One hour, and then the next. The light moves across the floor of this chamber and I watch it move and I think: there. That is enough. Follow the light.

I am twenty and four years of age. I have kept this house for three years. I have read my Bible and ground my ink and stitched until my fingers were sore and prayed as I was bidden and loved my husband honestly and waited for this child with a joy so large I could not speak of it without weeping, and none of that, not one thread of it, told me how to bear this particular morning.

And yet I am bearing it.

That, I think, is my answer to you. Not God, though I do not forsake Him. Not duty, though I shall return to it. But this: the fact of having held, and been made to let go, and remaining. The fact that love does not require its object to persist in order to persist itself. I loved him before I knew him. I love him now he is gone. That love must go somewhere. It is pointing, even now, like a needle finding north, toward something I cannot yet name.

That is my direction. I am following a love that has nowhere left to go, and trusting it knows the way.

Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.