The Name He Does Not Say

The day room takes the afternoon light straight down its west wall, and at four the cart comes around, and for about twenty minutes the whole room smells of tea and the cheap sweet cookies that come two to a packet. There is a jigsaw on the table by the window with the top left corner missing. It has been missing for a year. Nobody minds. The television is on with the sound down, and a woman in the second chair conducts it with one hand.

He is very courteous. That is the thing she was not ready for. Nobody warned her that the manners would outlast the man.

She sits down and he says, well now. He says, have you come far. She says, about forty minutes, and he says, that is a long way, and takes her hand and pats the back of it twice, and asks her about ten minutes later whether she has come far. She says forty minutes. He says that is a long way.

She brought the album. He goes through it the way a polite person goes through a stranger's photographs: interested, generous, entirely outside it. He stops at a picture of a woman on a beach in a headscarf, holding her hat down in the wind. He looks at it for a long time. Then he says, your mother would have liked you.

That is her mother. He means his wife. He is telling his daughter that his wife would have liked his daughter, and he means it kindly, and he is right.

She stays until the cart comes back. He calls her dear, twice, and dear is a word for somebody whose name you do not have. On the way out a nurse says he had a good afternoon, he does have good afternoons, and she says thank you, and she means it.

In the parking lot the phone buzzes. It is somebody from Wednesday night, and the message says: believing with you for the full restoration of his memory. Three prayer hands after it. And she sits in the car with her hand on the key and does not start it, because the woman who sent that is not a fool and is not a fraud and has brought her soup twice, and because what she wants to type back is not a sentence she is proud of.

You have your own day room. It might be your father, or your mother, or a marriage that has gone somewhere you cannot follow, or a body that keeps signing off on functions one at a time. And you have the message. You know the exact feeling of a kindness landing on you like a weight, and having nowhere to put your face.

You are being told nothing about your standing with God by the name he cannot find. Isaiah 49:16 says He has engraved you on the palms of His hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been sitting with you in that room all afternoon, holding what nobody at that table could hold.

The remembering belongs to God

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice who does the verb.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

In a room where remembering is the one thing that has failed, Scripture hands the remembering to Someone else. He knoweth our frame. The word underneath frame is the word for a thing that has been formed, a made object, a shape a potter's hands decided on. God is not startled by what your father's brain turns out to be made of. He knew the material when He picked it up.

And read the line just above it, because the psalm sets it there on purpose: like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear Him. That is verse thirteen, sitting one line above the dust. In a room where a father does not know that he is a father, the psalm has already put a Father in the room who does.

You have a Father in that day room whose memory of you has never once thinned. It is written in Psalm 103:14 that He remembereth what we are made of, and it is the same Spirit who inspired that line who has been keeping your name intact through every afternoon he called you dear.

What is being restored, and what is not

Now the honest part, and this site would not be worth reading if it flinched here.

Some things are not coming back. Not by the strength of your believing and not by the strength of mine. There may be no afternoon in which he says your name and means you. If God does something else, that is God's and He does not clear His decisions with me first, so I am not going to stand here and tell you what is coming, and I am not going to hint at it either, because a hint is a promise wearing a coat.

And restoring is not the same act as reissuing. A reissue would be your father at sixty, walking in the back door, saying your name the way he said it. That is not what the word means and it never was. To restore is to put back into a person what was taken out of them, and it is a work done on the living, not a copy run off from an old file. What is being put back into you is not a duplicate of the daughter you were before this started. It is you, deeper, with more room in you than you had, and you did not want that trade and nobody asked you.

You were never required to pretend the loss is smaller than it is in order to qualify for what God is doing. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries the pouring, including the part of it you would not want written down.

And the woman who sent the message. I am not going to make her the fool of this article. She reached for the biggest word she had because sitting beside you with no word at all is unbearable, and love that has run out of language will grab the nearest large sentence and hand it over. She was not being careless with you. She was being brave in the only direction she could see. You can let her be right about God and wrong about the timetable, and you never have to perform her certainty to keep her.

You are permitted to hold two true things at once and never made to resolve them into one. Romans 12:15 puts rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep in a single sentence, so the word itself declines to make you choose, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries both weathers in a person without either one canceling the other out.