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Kelly J. Beard
The Heft of a Soul

Maybe every cross is a symbol
of hope that death is an illusion
not the final expression of life.
My husband and I wore matching crosses
for twenty years, until I lost
mine, a careless swim, a night
away, a fit of rage. Who knows
how losses accrue. He kept on
wearing his until the morning
I watched death rattle his wasted frame
as though God had to shake his soul
from his body, like salt
from a shaker.

I removed two things from his
uncoiled body that morning
the gold band he’d never removed
     (I’d sold mine years earlier
     during some crisis of faith
     or love, and only then
     did I rue the loss)
and his cross.

The week before
I asked him, what do you think
will happen after you die?
I made us have hard conversations
that felt both necessary
and mean.
I don’t know, he said
     (although he hadn’t
     been able to speak much that last year,
     he spoke these words clearly, coherent
     as the man I’d married)
but I think I’ll still be
married to you.
He watched me
from his chair, a smile like a question.
I think so, too, I said, before we burst
into laughter we couldn’t know
would be our last.

The cross weighs half a gram
about the weight of a hawk’s feather
or the heft of a soul. When I hold it
in my palm, I see us kneeling
at an altar, morning light glinting
off every shiny surface—we’re dead
serious about this decision, the notion
that our young daughter will need this
sacred space someday tamps our arguments
against joining the church—
     we dread giving up our mornings
     cringe at the communal chalice
     hate the sermons on tithe—
but we are willing to pray at this rail
drink from the cup with a wince
accept the weight of these crosses
for a wild bet on eternity.

The congregation sings
some stiff hymn as we walk back
to our pew, the tang of port on our tongues.
He whispers sotto voce in my ear,
Why can’t Episcopalians carry a tune?
And I simultaneously scowl and hide
a guff of laughter behind my hand.

After we leave the church
his illness and our daughter’s
icy distance become grievances
I can’t forgive, the way I can’t release
the shame of that last refusal
when he asked me to go
to church with him again.

I hold his cross
in my palm, looking for him
in this bit of silver, willing it
to transform me, to open
a portal to the faith
he never lost.
I tell him this
at night, in a room
where he no longer sleeps.

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