The Margins in Her Handwriting

It is a hardback with a broken spine and a rubber band around it, which is how she kept it for the last eleven years because she would not let him buy her a new one.

He has been reading it since April. Not reading it, exactly. He opens it and his eye goes past the printed text, which he can more or less say from memory anyway, and lands on whatever she wrote in the margin.

Most of it is nothing. A date. A tick. The word yes with two lines under it beside a verse in Isaiah, which he has looked at eleven or twelve times now trying to work out what she meant by it and what was happening in her life that week. Beside one psalm, in pencil, in handwriting that is smaller than the rest: for Danny. Danny is their son. Danny is thirty four and lives four hours away and has no idea.

He can read that book in Greek if he wants to. That is not a boast, it is his actual training, and it has been the shape of his working life for thirty years. He has stood in front of rooms and taken that chapter apart clause by clause.

Since April, none of it. The text is a gray field with her handwriting scattered across it, and he goes in for the handwriting.

There is a version of this that worries him, which is that he has swapped the word of God for a relic. That he is not reading Scripture at all, he is reading her, and calling it devotion because it happens at the same table at the same hour.

Sit down. Nobody is coming to take the book off you.

He keeps a record of the crying

Here is a verse a scholar can go past for thirty years because it looks like a figure of speech.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

Three images, one after another, all doing the same work. A count kept of a man's restless nights. A container for tears. A ledger with the crying written in it. The Spirit put all three of those into one verse, which is not the economy of a writer trying to be brief.

You know the setting of that psalm better than most people do. It is written by a man who was in serious trouble and afraid, and he is not asking God to explain the trouble. He is asking whether the misery is being noticed, and the form of the question tells you he already suspects it is.

So take it at that table. You are the man in that verse and the record is being kept, and Psalm 56:8 says God has a container for what a person cries at a kitchen table in April, and the Spirit who inspired it did not intend it only as poetry for the comfortable.

That is worth more to you than it sounds. A man who has handled this material professionally develops a reflex for discounting the tender verses, on the grounds that they are the ones people misuse. Fine. But the discounting reflex is now standing between you and one of the few lines in the book that is specifically about being watched while you fall apart.

The margins are not a betrayal of the text

Now the worry, which is a real question and deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.

You are not reading a relic. Consider what is actually on those pages. Her handwriting is a record of a believing woman meeting the written word of God over decades, and what you are reading in the margins is the effect of Scripture on somebody you love, which is not a lesser thing than Scripture and is certainly not a substitute for it.

You have not swapped anything. The word is doing something to you at that table, and what it is doing is running through the person who is missing, and the Spirit is capable of working by that route and does not seem embarrassed by it.

Think about it the other way around. If she had left no marks at all, you would be sitting with a clean book and nothing of her in it, and you would be worse off. The rubber band and the broken spine and the pencil are not clutter on the text. They are testimony.

There is a second thing in those pages, and it is easy to miss because it is so ordinary. She wrote dates. Which means somebody could reconstruct, roughly, what she was carrying in a given year by which verses got the ink. That is a record of a woman being met by God across decades, and it is sitting on your kitchen table under a rubber band. You are holding evidence, and nothing written anywhere says a grieving man is disqualified from looking at it, and the Spirit who worked in her across those decades is the one who left the marks where you could find them.

And here is the part your training will fight. You do not have to be doing exegesis for it to count. There is nowhere in Scripture where God grades reading by method, and a man going into a book to find the handwriting of his wife is a man who is opening the book, which is more than a great many people manage in April.

For Danny

One more thing, and it is the practical one.

There is a pencil note in a psalm that says for Danny, and Danny is four hours away and does not know it exists. That is not a private artifact. It was written by his mother and it has his name on it.

You are holding something that belongs to more than one person. Nothing written anywhere makes grief a solo discipline, and the Spirit given to a family is given to it as a family rather than to one man at a table in the dark.

Ring him. Or photograph the page and send it, which is easier and is allowed. What you do not want is to be the sole custodian of that pencil mark for eleven years, because that is a weight, and it was not addressed to you.

And there is something in it for him that is not in it for you. He is thirty four and he has, at some point, wondered whether his mother prayed for him specifically or just in general the way parents do. There is a pencil answer to that question sitting in a psalm four hours away from him. What is written about a mother in that house is now yours to hand over, and the Spirit is not asking you to carry it by yourself.