At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little. And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.

Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris”

“At the end of my suffering/there was a door.” I read this line from Louise Glück’s poem “The Wild Iris” in 2001, when I was twenty-seven years old. On one mild Texas winter day I sat reading on a swing at the top of a small hill overlooking a muddy patch of the Guadalupe River. I thought I was living a romantic writerly dream in Martindale, a small, dusty town of a few hundred residents south of Austin, but in truth, I hated it. The air drooped with bugs, no matter the season or hour of the day. Cockroaches scattered each time I opened the screen door and often perched, like burglars caught in the act—on the shower curtain, on my desk, in a stack of dirty dishes.

In the summer, drunken river revelers floated by on inner tubes and threw their empty beer cans on the lawn that sloped down to the murky water’s edge. The swaying trees in the yard offered shade but no relief from the heat, which felt like a heavy hand pressing down on the top of my head. An abandoned schoolhouse surrounded by a chain-link fence faced the house, guarding the other side of the gravel road, and farther along on that same street (which was Main Street), a man who wore overalls and no shirt tinkered with rotting cars in a tumbledown brick building, a faded American flag stretched across one wall, end to end. Each time I ran past him he said, as if for the first time, “If it hurts so much to run, why don’t you just walk? It pains me to watch you.” Each time I waved without smiling, and kept running (more of a limp-run, but I was consistent at least).

When I ran at night, which I often did just to avoid this awkward interaction, and because I was embarrassed by my strange and painful-looking running gait, the light from the snapping streetlights made bone-like shadows around the cars’ wrecked bodies. In the flickering light these skeletons appeared to rise in order to take off in a gutted Mustang or a boat-sized Plymouth. Each night, every night, and all night, the pit bull tethered to a post in front of the house across the road wailed and howled and growled and barked, straining against the thick chain, biting the air, gums gleaming, his tail wildly sweeping back and forth, as if this might somehow loosen him from his cruel captivity. He’d been trapped there so long that the collar had grown into the flesh of his neck. I wondered if freeing him might kill him.

As a graduate student, when I wasn’t running or writing or thinking about writing, I was reading. I had always taken refuge in the life of the mind, and now I wanted to be a writer. Navigating emotional territory through the written word would become my specialty. I was earnest, but also anxious. “Writing takes a remarkable resilience of spirit,” my favorite writing teacher had promised, or perhaps it was a warning. Did I have this quality? I looked for the answer in poetry, novels, memoirs, and essays. I never thought to look closely at the wider world and the objects and creatures within it for lessons about how to live and love. I never thought about the staying power of things in the world, and what could be learned from the great materiality and texture and mystery of objects and phenomena, known or unknown, and their power to impart meaning across time solely by virtue of their existence. I never thought about what the events of my own life examined within and as parts of the context of that world might teach me, how the world itself might hold me, even when I felt it had betrayed me. How its dynamism and its passivity might open a door to possibility. Instead, I was trapped inside my own thoughts. A lot.

On that particular overcast afternoon, Glück’s line knocked me out of my delusions—of grandeur or intelligence—as I sensed a truth in it that was both familiar and strange. It was a genius line, of course, and I desperately wanted to be a genius, but it was more than that. It was something more fundamental—the bottom of a feeling that grows up into emotion, either forcefully, through trauma, or thoughtfully, through attentive care. I couldn’t think my way into it, which frustrated and moved me. This line did not require my intelligence; it required my full presence, which I was (and always had been) reluctant to give. I knew I was reading a truth I did not yet know and I felt a sharp point of pressure behind each of my eyes. I was softened, alert, and also guided in some way. How would I uncover that nugget, whole, and hold it in my hands? Was I equipped to deal with it if I managed to work it free? To what or whom would it belong? What were the responsibilities of being the guardian of this truth, or was guarding any kind of truth a distinct impossibility, just another inflation of the ego, another act of hubris? The pain and triumph expressed in that single line were beyond my capacity, although I did not yet know how, or why, and this frightened me.

An old graveyard formed the ragged boundary of the backyard that sloped to the river. I often visited this tree-shaded square, the size of a small park, feeling the gentle pull of mud against my feet as I walked through the uneven rows of gravestones. Robert Hass’s observation in Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry that “the whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery” resonated with me. This was certainly a graveyard, and the stones marked the resting places of Confederate soldiers, but most marked the graves of babies and children: two months old, two days old, four years old, six weeks old, five and fifteen. Thomas, John, Robert, James. Edith, Mary, Anne. Solid names. A low, almost cool-ish fog—thin as a vapor—that would burn off when the sun began its daily blaze was slung like a thin canopy over the untended graves. Nineteen sixty-five was the most recent death date I could find, although I searched, as if a newer headstone might reveal some fresh truth that the older ones could no longer provide. I brushed back weeds as tall as I was as I made my way into the older section, some of the stones leaning there to the left or right, haphazard as if they’d been tossed, like those I would one day see at Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, a hillside dotted with gravestones that seemed loosened from the earth, like rotting teeth about to fall from a diseased mouth.

I lingered over the baby graves—aghast, saddened, subdued. I half expected to see the graves of the parents right beside those of their children, separated only by a matter of months, days, minutes. What did those parents do? I wondered. Where did they go? I could stay in this somber, melodramatic mode of questioning because I had never had a child. If I had, I would have turned, wordlessly, walked away from the graveyard and never returned.

“At the end of my suffering/there was a door”—it took me thirteen years, two marriages, two children, two homes, two deserts—in truth, two lives—to understand this line, and to make peace with its terms, which have been brutal, but also blazing and necessary.

We think the solution is obvious: a griever survives to walk through to another space, the other side, closing the door on an experience gratefully left behind; this is how I initially understood Glück’s line. The suffering was over. Slam. And now a new life, a bright and shining salvation, uncomplicated and complete. A resurrection. “Jesus is risen,” people chant on Easter Sunday. He doesn’t linger in the doorway or loiter in some liminal space between heaven and earth. He’s gone. To find him you must look up and you must believe. But none of us lives in the Bible, and I don’t believe in resurrections or in any God.

This is what it was, and this is what I believe: There was great suffering. Then there was a door. I stood in the threshold of that door and understood that I would always be there, at the opening, sometimes clinging to the hinges. Just as the door opened to love, it would remain wide open to suffering. This is the only way to live, and the only way to love in the manner that I had always wanted to love without knowing what it felt like, or what it might cost me. Then the whole world became my teacher. Those are the terms Glück’s line crystallizes, the terms it took me one quarter of my life to understand and accept, although on some days I still want to reject them.

One early morning when I was out for a run on my usual route, I saw that the dog across the street had finally broken free of his stake, although it was still attached to him, as was the rusted, rattling chain. Surprised, I stopped, almost falling over my feet, feeling the artificial knee freeze up, swallowing each heartbeat and wishing for once that my mechanic friend would make an appearance at this predawn hour and help me out in case this encounter took an ugly turn. The dog stood in the middle of the road, his skinny black body trembling, his ribs a visible cage around which his ragged, filthy fur alive with fleas was stretched. He growled once, a distinct warning. Sweat blurred my vision, but I didn’t swipe at my eyes or move at all for fear this would be interpreted as aggression. We stood facing each other for a few moments, motionless as if under a spell, although I could see the dog was shaking as I was. I fought to catch my breath. The dog, teeth bared, fought to keep still. Finally he turned and ran down the road, the chain rattling behind him, a snake of dust curling up in his wake.

The dog disappeared around the corner, the dust settled, and all that was left to see was that open road, the flat land stretching into the hazy distance, and the red-gold sun popping up on the horizon. Sweaty and still, I stood in awe of him, for running with and through his fear, running no matter what, running because he could. I could no longer see him but I imagined him: broken and trembling and terrified and damaged, he was still headed somewhere, resilient not because he left his difficult life behind for something better, but because, like all of us, he carried the source and the history of his pain with him. The instruments of his suffering were also part of his survival.

This, then, is how we all must—and do—live.