Into the Light

On moving forward.

View of the Stone Arch Bridge from the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis. April 2022. Photo by the author.

“O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”

“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.”

~ William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I took this picture in April, 2022, a year before my husband died. We were at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis for the season’s final performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The play had just ended; the audience moved slowly, still in a state of enchantment, down a wide corridor towards the exit.

I’d read The Tempest many times but had never seen it performed. Despite having no other production to compare it with, I knew it was perfect. I felt released, like the play’s mysterious spirit Ariel, from a spiteful and arbitrary captivity. In my sixties, having read all of Shakespeare, having seen many of the plays at least once, I had yet to see The Tempest.

Now, that had changed. I was changed. It was magic.

But old habits persist. As soon as I left the auditorium and saw the view in front of me, I felt the urge to indulge in another type of magic. You know what I mean: the black art contained in the small rectangular object I carry everywhere. I pulled it from my purse.

“I’ll catch up with you,” I said, holding up my phone.

“Meet you in the lobby.”

As my husband walked away, I aimed my camera at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river and snapped away.

I wish I could say I was mindful of the time. When I look at those photos now, dozens of them, pulling up the metadata, I see that I took the first one at 8:59 pm and the last at 9:12, thirteen minutes of standing, crouching, adjusting the zoom, setting long exposures and short ones, hiding my annoyance at the people who were clearly from out of town and had no idea what they were looking at. Who kept pointing out landmarks that were actually dull office buildings from the sixties.

Finally, they moved on. I focused on the swags and pillars, the lozenges and diamonds of light. On the glorious shapes that light takes when you pay attention.

But I wasn't paying attention.

When I got to the lobby, he was sitting alone on one of the faux-leather benches designed with aesthetics, rather than comfort, in mind. His eyes were closed, his face clenched in pain. All of the other patrons had left the building. I hurried over and sat next to him.

“I am so, so sorry.” His arthritis. We always chose aisle seats so he could extend his legs. He’d already sat for the two-hour duration of the play, uncomplaining.

“Hand me my cane, please,” he said. His voice was tired, but with no edge of bitterness or anger. The tickets were a birthday gift. What a way to show my love and appreciation. Did I really need to document every detail by holding a camera in front of it?

What mattered was the moment. Not the megapixels.

Five weeks later, I held his hand as the oncologist pointed to the bright-red stalagmite on a screen and said some words including lung cancer, Stage 4, terminal. The following April, during the brief time it took me to walk with our adult children from his room to the front door of the hospice, he took his final breath, alone.

That evening of enduring magic — The Tempest — was his last birthday gift to me.

I know that the people in this picture are, in reality, their reflections. But if I toggle the image into Live mode, they move forward, engaged in thought or in conversation. Looking across the Mississippi River to downtown Minneapolis, all is seamless. The carpeted floor of the wide hallway dissolves through the glass and into the water.

The Stone Arch Bridge and the branches of still-bare trees cut through the shadow of my husband’s chest, opening it in soft cascades and long slow gestures of light.

And my heart opens, too, on this New Year’s Eve. I’m alone, but not really. He’s not just an image. I turn off the lamp and sit in stillness, lit by his picture on my phone. I’m regretful, and yet . . . No. The bright warm colors of his life ripple and glow.

Our revels now are ended, says Prospero, in the play.

Magic, the light says, never ends.

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Friends,

2024 has been the best year of my life. You — my community of readers — have made Writer, interrupted the joyful project that it is. Nothing makes me happier than sitting down to write a new post or to respond to one of your lovely and generous comments. I am deeply grateful. I know that the next year will be filled with such stuff as dreams are made on.

May your holidays be blessed, and may the New Year bring peace.

Mary xo

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Mary xo