2 min read
Days after entering hospice care, poet and activist Belinda Manning sat down in an intimate circle of friends who requested her story. Among the many gems that surfaced, one thread that has woven through her life is a distinction between “reality” and “truth”. Reality, she suggests, is what the culture insists upon; truth is larger, older, and more stubborn. Her father knew this. He pitched through taunts to a championship, refused Major League Baseball money to honor the female-owned team he was on, and drove six hours in the night to collect his daughter and her acquaintance stranded on a shutting-down campus — not his daughter’s roommate, not her best friend, just someone who needed a ride. “He loved deeply — deeply — everything he touched,” Belinda says, “and it grew in his presence.” Now, admitted to hospice, she and her husband are filling small heart boxes — tucking in hand-stitched hearts, monarch wings, and notes — to mail across the planet, as a small offering of love. And then there is the water jug: brought to her thirty years ago by a former student, worn smooth on one side by a little girl’s head as she carried water in India, it has waited on a shelf until now. Belinda finally knows what it’s for — it will hold soil from every continent, dried flowers from the funerals of people she has loved, the earth others carried back to her from their walks through the world, and, in her own words, “My body will rest in soil, in flowers, in that vase.” In her heart’s conviction, there is the particular luminosity of a person who has learned to love the dark as tenderly as the light.
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