I am sitting in an infusion chair in Columbus, Ohio, looking through a wide window at a canopy of green trees. The sky is blue, and the September sun is shining. Beside me, hanging from a metal pole, is a bag of medicine dripping slowly through a line into my right arm.

The medicine is designed to kill the cancerous cells that have returned to my body. It will also kill healthy cells I need for a strong immune system. There is a bargain in that. For the next year or so, I will be careful about where I go and whom I am around. In exchange, this medicine may give me years of life.

This is my third round of treatment for chronic leukemia. My husband and I, along with our old dog, have moved temporarily to Columbus, where I will be treated for the next eight weeks. Yesterday I spent eight hours in this chair. Today I am back for another long infusion.

There is a great deal of time to look out a window and think.

And my thoughts keep traveling 600 miles away, to Memphis.

I have written about what is happening to the immigrant community in my city. I have marched. I have helped serve meals to families who became afraid to leave their homes. I have listened to mothers describe keeping their children home from school, and workers explain why they no longer feel safe driving to their jobs.

Something is changing in Memphis. Immigration enforcement has grown more visible and more aggressive, and resistance to it is growing too. Clergy, organizers and ordinary citizens are standing outside detention facilities and gathering wherever federal agents appear.

From this chair, I have found myself thinking about a question I once believed I understood much better than I do now:

What do we owe one another when the government begins doing things we believe are wrong?

A few weeks ago I watched Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, about life in France under German occupation. Ophuls does surprisingly little explaining. Mostly, he lets people talk.

I have not been able to stop thinking about them.

France fell to Germany in June 1940. A French government established at Vichy chose collaboration. French institutions continued to function. Bureaucrats went to their offices. Businesses opened. Children went to school. Families gathered for dinner.

And in the middle of that ordinary life, the Vichy government enacted antisemitic laws. French authorities identified, arrested, and detained Jews. French police participated in roundups that sent human beings toward deportation and death.

Some people resisted and risked everything. Some embraced the new order. Between them lived a great many people who wanted to protect their families, keep their jobs, and continue with their lives.

Those are the people Ophuls places before us.

They explain themselves. They remember what they believed and what they did. They have had twenty-five years to make sense of the distance between the two.

After liberation, the compromised years grew tidier in memory. It became easier to remember what one had privately believed than what one had publicly done.

History looks clear once we know how it ends.

Memphis in 2026 is not occupied France in 1940. Immigration enforcement is not the Holocaust. The differences in history, scale and consequence are enormous, and they matter.

But history does not have to repeat itself to ask something of us.

Since the Trump administration sent hundreds of federal agents to Memphis last September, local journalists have documented what followed. The Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis has reported on cooperation between local police and federal immigration agents. MLK50 and ProPublica examined nearly four months of task force arrest reports and found that more than 800 immigrants were arrested as unlawfully present. Only 17, about 2 percent, were also arrested for a violent crime.

Then, early one Sunday morning, August 30, federal and state agents entered El Corralón, a nightclub near Berclair. Somewhere between 100 and 120 patrons and employees were taken away in three buses and two vans.

Families gathered outside, trying to learn who had been taken and where they were going.

Three buses are harder to look away from than one person taken beside a road.

But why should scale determine when our conscience wakes up? Was the first mother taken from her child less worthy of our attention because she disappeared alone? How many people have to be taken before a community decides this is not someone else’s concern?

I find the question I began with harder now because I can no longer ask it only of presidents or mayors or police officers or federal agents.

Eventually it reaches the rest of us.

Eventually it reaches me.

For seventeen years I have led Team Max, a holiday food program that grew out of the death of my son. It began with 500 baskets. This December, we will distribute 8,000. Over the years, we have given away something near 80,000.

I built it because after Max died, I needed to believe that love could still have somewhere to go.

Over the years, that grief became food. It became thousands of volunteers standing shoulder to shoulder. It became families carrying boxes to their cars. It became, for me, one answer to the question of what we owe one another.

Work on that scale depends on relationships among businesses, philanthropists, public officials, institutions, and volunteers. People who agree with me and people who do not. People whose trust and generosity make it possible to feed thousands of families.

I have spent years building those relationships.

And lately I have begun to notice the calculations I make to protect them.

There have been times when I wanted to speak more plainly but didn’t, because I knew I might need the person or institution I was criticizing to help me accomplish something else I believed mattered.

I can give you good reasons for those choices.

Some of them may even be right.

But I have begun to wonder about the family standing in the Team Max line and the family afraid to leave its house.

The same city. The same hunger. The same people.

If I believe we belong to one another in December, what does that belief require of me in September?

That question has been harder to sit with.

Leadership requires relationships. Relationships require compromise. Much of my adult life has been spent bringing people who disagree together. Usually I consider that one of my strengths.

Lately I have been wondering where that strength ends, and something else begins.

This is where The Sorrow and the Pity began to trouble me in a way I had not expected.

I had been watching people explain choices made under circumstances unimaginably more consequential than my own. Again and again, they described what they had been trying to preserve: a livelihood, an institution, a family, some ability to remain useful or do a little good.

Their circumstances are not mine. Their choices are not mine.

But I recognize the human instinct.

We protect what we love.

We calculate what speaking might cost and what silence might preserve. Sometimes that calculation is wisdom. Sometimes it is fear.

Before we know the ending, I am not sure we always know the difference.

Most of us will never be asked to perform some great act of resistance. We are asked smaller things, almost every day. Whether to speak. Whether to remain silent. Whether to look closely at something we would rather not see. Whether to risk a relationship, a position, an invitation, a little comfort, a little standing in the world.

We make those choices without knowing which ones history will remember. Usually we make them without imagining history is watching at all.

I had imagined myself watching Ophuls’s film from a safe distance, assessing the choices other people had made.

Then I noticed that I was making calculations of my own.

Outside my infusion-room window, the September sun is still shining on the trees. The bag beside me is emptier now. Drop by drop, the drug enters my bloodstream, destroying cells I need in order to save the life I have.

This is a bargain I understand. I know what I am risking and why I chose it.

The bargains we make with power are harder to see.

Nurses move quietly among the infusion chairs. Somewhere in Memphis, people are going to work, taking children to school, buying groceries, sitting down to dinner.

A city continues with its ordinary life.

So does a country.

That may be what makes these moments so difficult to recognize. History does not announce itself. Most of the time, it arrives inside an ordinary day and asks something of us.

The people in Ophuls’s film had twenty-five years to decide what their choices had meant.

We are living before the ending.

We have only the choices in front of us.

What are we willing to accommodate? What are we trying to protect?

And what, in the end, do we owe one another?

I was thirteen years old the first time I remember love hurting.

Nothing had happened.

I was lying in my bed in Charles City, Iowa, thinking about my mother. I thought about how much I loved her, and then my father, my sister, my brother. One by one I held them in my mind, and something began to happen inside me that I didn’t understand. The feeling grew until there seemed to be nowhere in my body to put it.

I began to cry.

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t frightened. Everyone I loved was still there. I simply loved them more than I knew how to hold.

I don’t remember telling anyone about it. What would I have said? I was thirteen. I didn’t have a vocabulary for too much love. I only knew that something beautiful could hurt.

The feeling never entirely went away.

In Memphis, spring arrives with an explosion. Forsythia first, that brilliant yellow, then jonquils and cherry trees, and finally the dogwoods opening against a blue April sky. I have never been very good at driving past them.

There are errands to run. A grocery list on the seat beside me. Somewhere I am supposed to be. Other cars keep moving.

And I want to stop.

Look at that.

How can you possibly keep driving?

It isn’t simply that the dogwood is beautiful. Beauty feels like too small a word for what happens. Something in me is being asked to pay attention. For a few seconds the ordinary world falls away, and there is this white blossom against that enormous blue sky, something so magnificent and so temporary that I cannot quite take it in.

Rilke wrote that beauty is “nothing but the beginning of terror.” I wonder if he meant what I have felt all my life: there are moments when beauty exceeds our ability to contain it.

I feel it in music.

Years ago, in Aspen, I heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony performed under a tent. It is called the Symphony of a Thousand, an exaggeration born from the enormous forces Mahler assembled: orchestra, soloists, children’s chorus, adult choruses. When all of them came together, the sound seemed too large for the structure containing it.

It was too large for me too.

Afterward, I went back to where I was staying and lay down.

I needed to recover from glory.

Even now, writing that sentence makes me smile at myself a little. Who has to lie down after a symphony?

Apparently I do.

Here in California, the ocean has become another version of it. Before the day begins, I can hear the rhythmic crash of water against the shore. A hawk nearby has already begun hunting. The mourning doves call in the morning, but their rhythm is different from the doves I know in Memphis. I can hear the difference.

Others may be drawn toward structure, mechanics, numbers, systems. Perhaps they experience their own astonishment when a machine works exactly as it should, when an equation resolves, when a bridge holds, when a thousand musicians somehow enter on the same beat. There are many ways of paying attention. There are many ways of being alive.

Mine seems to involve being pierced.

But nature and music are only the edges of it.

The deepest place has always been love.

When my first son, Morgan, was born, that old childhood ache returned. Here again was a human being I could love beyond anything that seemed reasonable or containable. Then Max. Then Mikey.

Years later, being a mother gave that childhood ache names and faces and bodies I could hold.

And then Max died.

His purple bear on the red plaid comforter. His stacks of CDs next to his MLA Handbook.

There are experiences for which the language of a heart “breaking” seems embarrassingly inadequate. And somewhere inside that grief was something strangely familiar.

I had felt its shape before.

My chest ached with it, the old impossible feeling that there was more love inside me than my body knew how to hold.

At thirteen, lying safely in my bed, everyone I loved still alive, I had discovered that love could hurt simply because there was too much of it.

After Max died, I learned what happened when all that love remained, and the person who had received it was gone.

And still the world keeps piercing us.

A dogwood blooms.

A hummingbird hovers impossibly at a flower.

A clarinet begins the slow movement of Mozart’s concerto.

A dog grows old and looks up at you with complete trust.

A man I loved long ago comes home.

The ocean keeps striking the shore.

Life teaches us how to put away the groceries, answer the telephone, get to work on time. We learn to keep driving past the dogwoods.

But some things still ask more of the heart than it knows how to hold.

Where does the love go?

Last week I finished Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds, a novel about the Dust Bowl migration. Families whose farms had blown away packed everything they owned into overloaded cars and drove west, grasping at hope and a handbill that guaranteed work in California. Good wages. Housing provided. Come now.

Everyone believed the paper.

That’s the heartbreaking part. They weren’t naive. The people who printed those handbills knew exactly how desperate people would read them.

Outside Bakersfield, families ended up in ditch camps. In the cotton fields, wages fell every week as more workers arrived. They were called “Okies,” treated as dirty and diseased, and made unwelcome in the very place that had invited them.

As I read, I kept picturing the road. Amarillo. Tucumcari. The long empty stretch across New Mexico, Needles, and the Mojave, where the heat makes the highway shimmer. Then the climb into the Tehachapis, and the sudden drop into all that green.

The valley announces itself before you see it. Your ears pop, and the air feels different. It’s cooler and heavier, filled with the smells of onions, diesel, and wet earth. Fields extend out on both sides, reaching the horizon in neat green rows. Somewhere out there, people are picking the almonds I eat at home and the carrots that will be packed into food boxes thousands of miles away.

I have driven this road more times than I can count, but never because someone recruited me.

I’ve crossed that valley many times to visit my sons. For years, I admired the fields and how much they grew. I rarely wondered who was asked to work there, or who was forced to leave.

The growers who printed those handbills had done it before.

California agriculture had long depended on Mexican and Mexican American labor. Growers recruited workers because the crops needed them. But when the Depression hit, the country that had welcomed them decided it didn’t want them anymore.

Between 1929 and the mid-1930s, somewhere between four hundred thousand and one and a half million people of Mexican descent were forced out of the United States. No one kept an accurate count, which says a great deal. Nearly sixty percent were American citizens, many of them children born here, placed on trains in Los Angeles and sent to a country they had never seen.

The fields still needed workers. So the handbills went east, to Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the Texas Panhandle, looking for another desperate population willing to work for less than those who had just been expelled.

During World War II, with a labor shortage, the government recruited Mexican workers once again. Ten years later, it deported many of them under Operation Wetback, turning a racial slur into federal policy. Today, roughly four out of every ten people harvesting America’s crops lack legal work authorization. The pattern continues even when the names change.

I have a family story about a man who went west. For years, I told it the wrong way.

In 1849, my great-great-grandfather, James Carson Marshall, left his wife Nancy and their children in Indiana. He joined a wagon train from Springfield, Missouri, and traveled nearly two thousand miles to California. Six months of river crossings, broken wagon wheels, and dust.

I used to think it proved that restlessness and adventure ran in our blood. It is a lovely story.

But it’s also a way to avoid thinking about the paper.

The year before he left, in December 1848, the President of the United States addressed Congress and confirmed that gold had been discovered in California. Newspapers across the country spread the news. By spring, the roads west were crowded. A piece of paper found its way into the hands of a young father who wanted a better life for his family.

He believed it because that is what the paper was meant to do.

The longing was the same. The hope was the same. The willingness to risk everything was the same.

The people who crossed the plains for gold, the families who followed the Dust Bowl handbills, the Mexican workers recruited to harvest California’s fields, and the families who come to our Pantry in Memphis, all respond to the same promise: work, safety, a future for their children.

Their stories only split apart after they arrived.

My great-great-grandfather came home with eighteen hundred dollars in gold and bought land in Nebraska. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough. He was white, American-born, and could vote. No one questioned if he belonged here or whether the country was finished with him. The gold he carried home bought land the government was in the business of handing to men like him. Enough to become part of the American story. Enough for later generations to remember his journey as an adventure.

Many of the Dust Bowl families eventually found their footing too. It took years and enormous hardship. But they were also white, native-born, and could vote. Their children became Californians. Their grandchildren scarcely remembered that “Okie” had formerly been an insult.

Others never received that chance.

I did not have to drive to California to find them.

In Memphis, the calls come through dispatch one family at a time. One morning, we loaded two pantry boxes into the truck and stopped at the grocery store for the rest: cilantro, tomatoes, onions, bananas, eggs, milk, whatever protein the budget could stretch to. Then we stretched it farther. Cookies found their way into the cart. So did two cases of soda. The sky had turned dark gray, the kind that comes before a summer storm in Memphis.

The address was in Berclair. Every movement is accounted for. We had arrived. We were approaching the house. We were knocking.

The door opened a few inches. An older woman, and behind her a young mother and five children.

“Immigrant Pantry,” I said through the gap.

The husband had been taken after a minor traffic stop, and three generations were learning to live inside the silence he left behind. We carried in boxes and the sacks of potatoes. Two small children gripped their grandmother’s legs. When we held up the cookies, their faces changed.

Delight before trust.

I heard myself say, “We’re so sorry. But we’re friends.”

I have thought about how many doors in this country open just that far, waiting to learn whether the strangers on the porch have come to take something away or to leave enough behind for another week.

The people who come to our Pantry build, mow, grow, process, package, and transport the food that fills grocery stores across America. They work because we need them to work. I am standing on this side of the door because a piece of paper worked out for my family. Eighteen hundred dollars in gold, land in Nebraska, four generations, and I am the one on the porch with the cookies.

For more than a century, we have repeated the same bargain. We recruit labor when crops need harvesting. We condemn that same labor when politics change. Then, a few years later, when the fields are empty again, we begin the search for another desperate group willing to believe the next promise.

Only the paper changes.

Now, the handbill will arrive on a smartphone. A website instead of a newspaper. A text message instead of a flyer nailed to a telephone pole.

Every generation believes the paper.

The machine depends on it.

A friend asked me over dinner recently, “Is it still happening here?”

She meant the raids. The arrests. The fear that settled over immigrant neighborhoods this past year.

I understood the question. It is not in the news the way it once was. Like so many things, it has drifted toward the edges of public attention.

Last week, I attended a gathering hosted by the Institute for Public Service Reporting. It was held in an art gallery, with all-white walls and high ceilings, paintings and sculptures arranged around a hundred folding chairs. At the front of the room, two red sofas held a panel of reporters who had spent months documenting immigration arrests across Memphis and Shelby County.

One by one, they described what they had seen.

The numbers kept climbing.

Families separated.

Parents gone.

Children alone.

At one point, reporter Meghnad Bose projected a White House website onto the screen behind him. He was looking for a statistic, something about the number of arrests. I do not remember the number.

What I remember is the website.

Against a field of stars, in the glowing green typeface of an old science-fiction movie, appeared these words:

For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.

Aliens have been walking among us.

The room grew still.

At first, it seemed impossible. It looked like satire. Something manufactured for social media. A parody someone had forgotten to label.

But it was real.

A real government website, paid for by the American people.

The aliens, it explained,

They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.

Then came the verdict:

They do not belong here.

But it was not the sentence I kept staring at. It was the word underneath it.

Alien.

History is full of moments when human beings are renamed. The words change from century to century. The purpose rarely does.

The name changes.

The story changes.

Then the people themselves begin to disappear beneath the language.

The website encouraged citizens to report suspicious activity. It kept a running tally of arrests. Its final instruction was blunt.

Deport them all.

The panel moved on.

The reporters kept talking.

But I was still thinking about the word.

Alien.

Days later, Steve and I drove to a small brick house in Berclair with four boxes of food in the back of the truck.

Mauricio Calvo came with us. He runs Latino Memphis. He spoke the language that let a frightened woman’s shoulders relax.

The woman who came to the door was named Keyla.

She is from Central America. She is beautiful. Her hair swept up and stacked high on her head, a baby on her hip, two older children gathered close behind her. A teenage daughter with watchful eyes. A son, Matteo, with long dark hair, who kept one hand on his mother’s arm the whole time we stood on the porch.

This is the face my government calls an alien. This grace. This woman holding her children together with her own two hands. They do not belong here, the screen said of her, in green letters, while she stood on her own porch more rooted, more present, than I have ever been.

Her husband was taken four months ago. One day he was there, and then he was not. He had been the family’s provider.

Since then, she has held the family together on her own. She cleans houses when she can find someone to watch the children, which is not often.

The baby is eight months old. His father has been gone for half of that small life. The child will not remember him.

They have no telephone. When Keyla first heard about our pantry, a friend had to call for her because there was no other way for her to reach us.

Through Mauricio, she told us they were glad we came. That there was no food in the house.

I looked past her into the kitchen and saw that this was true.

Our boxes were an abundance. Staples, fruit, meat, eggs. Diapers. Formula for the baby. We set them down on the porch near a worn bench seat salvaged from a vehicle and pressed into service as porch furniture.

Here is what I keep returning to.

The website does not say Keyla. It does not say, Matteo. It does not name the baby or the daughter. It cannot. Naming them would undo the machine because the machine depends on erasing names.

Alien. It. They.

First, the name changes. Then the story changes. Then the people disappear beneath the language, and the disappearing becomes easy, because by then no one is being taken from anyone. We are only, in the words of my government, returning it safely to its place of origin.

But I stood on that porch. I know her name.

And here is what I have to admit. Next week, Steve and I are getting in the car and driving to the cool of the California coast to escape the Memphis heat. We can do that. We can leave the heat whenever it presses too hard.

But, there is another heat that bears down on the people who cannot pack a car, who have no telephone to call for help, who answer every knock at the door not knowing whether it will be a neighbor with a bag of oranges or someone else entirely. It does not take a summer vacation. It is bearing down on Keyla tonight, on her porch, with her sleeping children and her husband’s absence.

We can leave. That is the whole truth of it. We can drive west and let the season pass somewhere kinder.

Keyla cannot leave. She is rooted to that porch, to that kitchen, to the eight-month-old who will not remember his father.

I do not know what will become of her. I will not pretend that I do.

I know only that when we come back from the coast, we will load the truck again, and again the week after that, and that it is not nearly enough, and that we will do it anyway, because she belongs here, and so, God help us, do we.

I am an hour north of Memphis in Annie Oakley, my Winnebago Travato, alone for the first time in months. Steve is home with the dog. The sheets are washed, the cabinets latched. Annie Oakley came into my life during the years when flying no longer felt possible. Since then, the road has become a place where I can hear myself think.

The road is doing what I asked of it. Emptying me out.

Yesterday, in Selma, there was a rally. I might have gone. I did not.

Instead, I am driving toward Omaha, where my mother grew up, where my family still lives, where I will spend a few days at the kitchen table of the people I love. Tonight I will sleep at an RV park in Nevada, Missouri. I have made this drive before. I did not understand until this morning that I have been making it my whole life.

In 1965, I was nine years old. We lived in Charles City, Iowa, a town with no Black families and little understanding of the country beyond its own horizon.

Every evening I came in from outside when my father returned home from work, and every evening I took my place on the floor in front of his chair, my back against it, my own legs stretched near his. I liked being near him. My mother sat on the couch adjacent. The television, black-and-white, was tuned to Walter Cronkite.

On the night I am telling you about, Cronkite was reporting from Selma.

I could not have explained what I was seeing. I knew only that people on a bridge were being hurt, and that the men hurting them looked like men I knew. Men who pumped gas. Men who bagged groceries. Men who nodded to my father on Main Street.

That night, I waited for my mother to come upstairs. When she sat on the edge of my bed, I asked her what it meant.

She told me about racism.

She told me that when she was a girl in Omaha, she had seen a white businessman stop on a public street in broad daylight and spit on a Black man.

I burst into tears.

I told her it wasn’t right. I told her I would do everything in my power to change it. I do not know whether she believed me. I do not know whether I understood what I was saying. I know only that after she left the room and closed the door, I cried into my pillow for a very long time, and when the crying was over, I had become a person to whom a promise had been made.

By me, to me.

In the dark.

I did not meet a Black person face-to-face until I was 12 years old, at a music camp in Des Moines. By twenty-two, I had left Iowa for the South, and I have lived there ever since.

Until this spring, I had never wondered whether I could stay.

The Supreme Court decision came first. Then, Tennessee moved quickly afterward. Maps were redrawn. Memphis was carved up. I read Heather Cox Richardson late one night the way you read a letter from a doctor: already knowing, before opening it, that something inside your life is about to change shape.

The racism my mother described to me at the edge of my bed had never disappeared. It had changed clothes. Changed language. Changed faces. But it had remained, patient beneath the surface of the country, waiting.

And for the first time in forty-seven years in the South, I wondered whether I had the strength for another season of it.

This is the question I have been driving with.

And this morning, somewhere between Memphis and the Missouri line, I understood that I am not going to leave.

It is not because I am brave or that I believe I will win. But because of a girl in Iowa who made a promise to her pillow in 1965 and has been keeping it ever since.

The promise is older than my marriage. Older than my children. Older than my work. Older than grief itself.

It is the oldest part of me.

And I realized, driving north through the flat green middle of the country, that nearly everything I have done has been an answer to the same question.

Miss Moody. LeMoyne-Owen College. Team Max. Deliveries in Nutbush. Essays written late at night this past year, while the country seemed to be coming apart molecule by molecule.

All of it answering the same question my mother asked without asking:

What will you do, now that you know?

I am driving to Omaha. My mother is gone. The businessman she saw is gone. The Black man he spat on is probably gone, too. The bridge at Selma has been crossed and crossed again. The men who beat the marchers in 1965 are old men now, or gone, and their grandsons are drawing district maps.

What has changed is not the promise but my understanding of it.

As a child, I thought the fight had an ending. I thought justice was a thing a country eventually arrived at if enough people suffered for it. I thought history bent because it wanted to.

I no longer believe that.

I think now that each generation is asked the same question in a different language. I think there are moments when history opens briefly in front of you and asks who you are. I think most of us answer before we even understand the question.

I answered mine in the dark in 1965.

Tonight I will sleep in Missouri. Tomorrow I will arrive in Omaha, the city where my mother first saw the thing I would spend my life trying to change. I will sit at my sister’s kitchen table. I will sit with the people I love. In a few days, I will drive south again to the place I am not going to leave.

Last Friday, people in Memphis asked me whether I still intended to stay in the fight. I told them I would think about it.

I am thinking about it now.

I will stay.

I do not know for how long, or to what end. I know only that the promise is still alive.

But somewhere tonight, a child is lying awake in the dark. She has seen something on a screen she does not yet understand. Her mother has come and gone. The door is closed. She is crying into her pillow.

And when the crying is over, the promise will belong to her.

I will never know her name.

What I know is that I am driving to Omaha. The road is empty.

The promise is not.

The lava fields began at the water’s edge. Black basalt stretched for miles in every direction, broken into folds and rivers, as though the earth itself had once been caught mid-motion and suddenly stilled. In places, the stone glittered with volcanic glass. Beyond it rose the long slopes of the mountains, dark green where the clouds passed over them, then charcoal again when the light shifted. Palm trees leaned into the trade winds. The ocean flashed suddenly blue at the edge of the road and disappeared again.

Creation is still happening here. You can feel it beneath your feet.

We drove for hours toward the volcano. Wild goats stood at the shoulder of the highway, descendants of animals brought ashore centuries ago, somehow still surviving in the harshness of the rock. The land looked impossible in places. Nothing should grow here. And yet it does. As the road began its long ascent, the bible green of the lowlands fell away, and the country turned wild and desolate.

Ahead, a wall of gray-white cloud hung across the landscape. The sky turned ethereal, descending in vertical spectral curtains — some heavy and dark, others light and misted with rain. The tropical warmth gave way to a bracing mountain cold.

At the crater, the air smelled faintly of sulfur. Steam curled upward from vents in the caldera and drifted sideways in the wind. Tourists stood quietly along the rim. Somewhere farther down the path, someone was laughing. We learned about seismic activity and eruption patterns, about pressure building far beneath the surface, where no one could see it yet.

No one knows the day, the ranger had said. You watch the data, and you wait.

Locals speak of Pele with reverence. I am not Hawaiian. I will not pretend to understand what belongs to them. I only know that standing there, looking down into the crater, I felt something older than language. Something immense and alive. Something that was here first.

I stood in the wind and rain and watched the steam rise from the earth.

Five days later, the volcano erupted.

Lava fountained into the night sky. Red arcs rose and fell, rose and fell, onto the black rock. By morning, the vog had drifted across the island, and people woke to a strange new air, eyes stinging, the sky the color of bruise.

At the airport in Kona, waiting for the flight home, I read the news from Memphis on my phone. The headlines had the familiar shape they had carried for weeks. Pressure coming down from somewhere else. Decisions made elsewhere. Men speaking about communities they do not know as though people were lines on paper that could simply be moved, erased, redrawn.

Across from me, a man in work boots looked at his phone while his little girl slept against his shoulder.

The airport was open-air, and the vog had begun drifting back out toward the ocean.

I thought of home. Of the line that forms before dawn, mothers waiting quietly in their cars, men unloading pallets in the cold, volunteers carrying boxes toward children half-asleep in back seats.

They do not perform their endurance. They continue.

There is a kind of power that announces itself — motorcades and legislation, raised voices, podiums, the long bright glare of screens. It demands to be witnessed. It insists upon itself.

And then there is the older force. The one that was here first and will be here last. It does not perform. It does not announce. It is what the ground is made of.

Women feeding children.

Men showing up after double shifts to unload trucks.

Grandmothers raising grandchildren whose parents are gone.

Immigrants building lives in the narrow space between exhaustion and hope.

People carrying food to one another because hunger is older than politics, and kindness is older than fear.

We carry what cannot be taken. What we do not surrender, no one can remove. The power was never theirs to grant.

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

The lava hardens eventually. What erupts in fire becomes stone. Then, over years, sometimes centuries, wind carries seeds into the cracks. Moss appears first. Then grasses. Then roots splitting open what once looked permanent.

The island itself is made of layer upon layer of pressure rising upward through the ocean floor across unimaginable spans of time. What looks still is not still. What looks barren is already becoming something else.

On the flight east, the Big Island disappeared slowly beneath the wing. Black shoreline. White surf. Blue water turning darker with distance. Somewhere below us, inside a crater I could no longer see, the earth was continuing its ancient work.

And somewhere ahead of me, in Memphis, the doors would open. Neighbors would carry food to those too afraid to leave their homes. The line would form before dawn. The children would come. Someone would hand a stranger a bag of food. Someone would carry more weight than anyone could see.

And beneath all the noise rising now around that city, beneath all the pressure coming down from above, something older and quieter would still be there. The ground itself. The ground that was here first.

There is a kind of rage a woman of my generation is not permitted to feel. We were taught to call it fear because fear is a feeling we are allowed to have. Fear is acceptable. I have been afraid for twenty-eight years. I have not, until this week, let myself call it what it is.

In 1998, I began the work of taking down the Confederate monuments in Memphis. Legendary civil rights attorney Walter Bailey brought me into the work. I was forty-something. I believed, in the way one believes such things at forty-something, that the work would have an end. That what we built would stand. That a statue, once removed, would stay removed. That a coalition, once built, would hold. That history, when corrected, would correct.

I am seventy now. Almost seventy-one. The statues are down. Some of the coalitions are still standing. I have stood at the MLK commemoration podium more times than I can count, and each year I have said the same things, and each year I have meant them, and the ground beneath the saying has shifted.

In the fall of 2017, the city was preparing to mark fifty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The nation was turning its attention to Memphis. The Tennessee state legislature had already passed the Heritage Protection Act, stripping local communities of the power to remove their own historical markers without state approval. I stood before the Tennessee Historical Commission on October 13, representing the city in our petition to remove the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. We were refused.

Among the threats that followed, a neo-Nazi named Billy Roper put my face on his website. He named my dead son. He named the anniversary of Max’s death and suggested, in language I will not reproduce, what might be done to his statue and grave that day.

The Memphis police moved me to a hotel room. Elmwood Cemetery took the rare step of closing. A police sergeant told me, “They will not get around us to get to your son.”

In those same weeks, I learned that I had leukemia. In those same weeks, a lung of mine collapsed. I told no one. The city needed me at the podium for the King commemoration, and I went, and I spoke, and I did not say that the body standing at the lectern was a body the doctors had begun to chart.

I called this courage. I have called it courage for eight years.

The transaction was quieter than that. It went like this: you can have fear, but you cannot have rage. Rage disqualifies you. Rage is what they are waiting for. Fear, on the other hand, is legible. Fear invites sympathy, and the work requires sympathy. So you will be afraid. You will not be angry. You will go to the podium. You will say the words. You will come home and say nothing about the lung, because if you say it, they will ask you to stop.

And you cannot stop.

Because if you stop, the bridge falls.

This is what I have been doing for twenty-eight years.

I have been holding up the bridge.

This week, the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. This week, the governor of Tennessee called the legislature back to redraw the district I live in. The district is more than sixty percent Black. The map will fix that.

The hand that put my face on Billy Roper’s website is not the hand that will sign the new map.

It does not have to be.

The force has been here longer than I have been alive. The names change. The offices change. The language changes. What does not change is the direction of the pressure, or the thing it presses against.

It has been here since 1968. It has been here since 1868.

What it wants is not me, and not Max, and not the Confederate generals on their pedestals.

What it wants is the bridge.

The bridge is what connects the people who gathered at St. Patrick’s last March to the sanitation workers who marched out of Clayborn Temple in 1968. It is what carries a line through time, from 1968 to now. It is what binds my body, with its leukemia and its scarred lung, to the body of the city.

It is the thing I have spent my life building and rebuilding.

It is the thing the hand has spent its life trying to take down.

There is no resolution to this. There is no end to this.

I am tired. I am not stopping.

I am calling it by its name.

I no longer need GPS to find Nutbush. The neighborhood has become familiar to me the way a place does when you’ve knocked on its doors softly, with a rhythm you hope doesn’t sound like a raid.

This morning, two deliveries. Same small cove. Little houses on little lots, directly across from each other.

The first house: broken steps, but whirligigs in the garden that say welcome in the only language whirligigs know.

Steve and I carry four boxes of food and a ten-pound bag of potatoes to the porch. I knock. I wait. I knock again. I text dispatch to notify them. Finally, the door opens, and a young mother appears, and I offer her my most broken Spanish.

Mi amiga. Comida.

A little boy, maybe three, no pants, appears at her hip and watches us carry the boxes inside with the gravity that small children bring to important things.

Then across the street. The grandmother, already watching from her doorway, two small children behind her, the TV on. A teenage boy is summoned. He looks at the four boxes and the bag of potatoes with something close to amazement.

I am turning to leave when I see her. The young mother across the street. Coming out of her house. Hands covering her face. I glance back at Steve. We both understand what is happening.

It took her this long to feel what support feels like.

I open my arms and walk toward her, and we hold each other on a street in Memphis, and both of us weep. When we pull apart, I turn and gently guide her toward Steve. They hold each other, too.

And across the street, the grandmother watches.

Gracias. Gracias.

I have been thinking about lionesses.

Shir means lion in Persian. Zan means woman.

Put them together, Shirzan, and you have something that doesn’t translate cleanly into English, which may be why it has stayed lodged in me since I encountered it. It means a woman who is more than brave, one who carries the nature of the lion as her own nature. It feels like something constitutional. Something she was made of before the world tried to make her something smaller.

I encountered the word in The Lion Women of Tehran. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

The lionesses of Tehran have been living under a theocratic state for nearly fifty years. They have been told what to wear, where to go, what to be worth. And yet they have filled the streets. They have cut their hair in public squares. They have chanted, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

Three words the regime could not beat into silence, though it tried. As I write this, bombs are falling on Iran.

There is a painting in my son Max’s room.

A young Indigenous woman stands where meadow meets sky, her dark hair braided, a shawl across her shoulders, wildflowers bending at her feet. She is looking out over the land toward something the rest of us can’t quite see. The artist, Reian Williams, does not use models. He begins with a poem, lets language conjure the woman, and then paints what the words call forth. She exists because of a prayer. She was made from one.

Steve and I found her at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Alice Walton’s extraordinary museum rising improbably from the Arkansas hills, itself an act of lioness thinking, the decision to put something that beautiful in a place that would surprise you. We bought her for each other for Christmas. We brought her home to Memphis and hung her in Max’s room, where she has been standing ever since, holding her gaze on the horizon, holding her prayer.

She dreams of days when wars will cease,

And every breath sown with peace.

For in her stillness, prayers release—

The fragile dream of lasting peace.

Fragile. Not impossible. Fragile.

As I write this, bombs are falling on Iran. I think the woman in that painting and the lionesses of Tehran would recognize one another across every distance, of culture, of century, of language. They are both standing in a field. They are both refusing to stop praying.

And they are not alone.

Here in America, something is being counted.

Women comprise the overwhelming majority of the grassroots resistance rising against the cruelty of this political moment. The Washington Post has been tracking it. The numbers aren’t even close.

They don’t call themselves lionesses. They call themselves volunteers. They call themselves neighbors. They show up on Thursday mornings with four boxes of food and a ten-pound bag of potatoes, and they knock softly, with a rhythm they hope doesn’t sound like a raid.

The Immigrant Pantry was built by women. Over two hundred volunteers, mostly women, going to grocery stores on behalf of other women and their children. There are no paychecks, no mandates. Just the ancient lioness instinct: you protect what you love, then expand the definition of what you love until it includes the young mother in Nutbush, the grandmother watching from across the street, and the little boy with no pants who watches you carry boxes with the gravity of someone witnessing something important.

Because he is.

He is watching the Shirzan.

He just doesn’t have the word yet.

I am back on that street in Nutbush.

She is coming out of her house with her hands over her face, and I understand immediately what I am watching. It is a mixture of grief and recognition. The moment a person discovers they have not been forgotten. That someone crossed a city to bring them potatoes and tortillas, and the simple, animal knowing that they are worth the trouble.

I open my arms.

She walks into them, and we hold each other and weep on a street in Memphis on an ordinary Thursday morning in an extraordinary and terrible time.

Gracias. Gracias.

I have been thinking about what it costs to hold a fragile dream against everything that wants to extinguish it. The women of Tehran know. The woman in Max’s room knows, standing in her field with her prayer and her wildflowers and her gaze fixed on a horizon that keeps refusing to yield peace.

We are all standing in that field.

The lionesses of Tehran. The woman painted from a poem. The volunteers in the grocery store. The grandmother watching from her doorway. The young mother who needed one minute to feel what it means to be held by the world, rather than crushed by it.

Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.

Woman. Life. Freedom.

We have always been here.

We have always been this.

Shirzan.

Monday, I attended a funeral mass. When my friend stepped behind the casket of her husband, I saw her face, and I recognized it.

I’ve known her for years, so what I recognized was the expression. The grief. The bewilderment. The thin composure stretched over something bottomless.

I took the funeral program and wrote four words across the back:

The Confederacy of the Humbled.

She had become a member.

The phrase comes from Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow. Russian aristocrat, stripped of title and estate, sentenced to house arrest in a grand hotel. He loses everything that once defined him. And in that diminishment, he discovers a quiet fellowship, people who have been brought low and, because of it, see differently.

Towles writes that its members carry no outward markings but recognize one another at a glance. They understand that beauty, influence, privilege, even health, are borrowed.

I heard the line while watching the television adaptation, and it stopped me cold.

Because I have been living inside it for sixteen years.

After my son Max died, people kept asking, “What can I do?”

There is no casserole for this. No errand to run.

So I said this: On the third of every month, at 6:31 p.m., the exact minute he left, I would sit in silence in my meditation room. If anyone wished to join me, they were welcome.

I did not know what I was beginning.

A few people came. We sat together in a small library I had turned into sacred space — candles, nothing elaborate. Twenty minutes of silence. Then we spoke.

We did not process death.

We sat in it.

Over time, the room filled. Some months, twenty people crowded shoulder to shoulder. Poetry began to appear. The silence held us.

This continued from 2009 until the pandemic shut it down in 2020.

What surprised me was who came.

It was not always the people I expected. Not necessarily my closest friends, not the people who had known me best or longest. The ones who kept coming were different.

It took me years to understand what bound them.

They had already been to the bottom of something. And at the bottom, they had done the hardest thing a human being can do.

They surrendered.

The kind that comes when there is nothing left to defend. The surrender ending the fight against what has already happened, the loss, the diagnosis, the addiction, whatever force had finally brought them to their knees. They stopped running from it. They stopped renaming it. They let it be what it was.

And that surrender changed their eyes.

But the deeper discovery was this: the core of the group, the ones who appeared year after year, were people in recovery. They had not lost a child. They had lost themselves to addiction, to the wreckage it makes, and they had found their way back, or were finding it. They had learned to sit with the darkest parts of themselves.

The Confederacy of the Humbled is a fellowship of those who surrendered to their wounds and, in the surrendering, were softened.

You cannot stay with someone else’s pain until you have learned to stay with your own.

My membership came in installments.

First, Max. The original shattering.

Years later, a diagnosis of chronic leukemia.

And one day, I walked into the open infusion room and saw what the Confederacy looks like when it gathers without knowing it has gathered.

Twenty-five people in recliners. Bags of chemotherapy dripping into their veins. A retired teacher. A young mother with her eyes closed. A man in a business suit who had clearly come from the office. A woman reading a paperback with her free hand.

Every one of them from a different walk of life. And in that room, none of it mattered.

We were all the same. Every one of us had been stripped of the illusion that we are in charge of our own bodies. We had surrendered to the truth that we are fragile, and that this fragility is what we share.

No one needed to explain themselves. No one needed credentials or context. We looked at each other the way members of the Confederacy do, with a recognition that lives below language.

And then, as if the initiation were not yet complete, the drugs I received in that room triggered a rare side effect, inflammatory arthritis that settled into my joints and became its own daily reckoning. The treatment handed me one more thing to surrender to. The body has its own curriculum, and it is not finished with you when you think it is.

There is a moment, after you have surrendered, when you look across a room and see someone who has been there.

Something in the way they hold themselves. Something in the way they do not look away from you.

It tells you everything.

And in that recognition, there is a kind of love unlike any other I have known. It stands apart from romance and from family. It is the love of people who have been broken open and learned to live from that place.

The surrender makes you gentler. It gives you eyes for suffering that you did not have before.

I think about this when I pull up to my neighbor’s apartment with bags of groceries. She does not open the door all the way. She is afraid, not of me, but of being seen. Her family is hiding from deportation, and fear has made their world very small.

I do not know her language well. She does not know mine. But when she looks at me through the crack in that door, I recognize something in her face, and I believe she recognizes something in mine.

The Confederacy does not stop at grief and illness and addiction. It extends to anyone who has been brought to their knees by forces beyond their control and has had to find a way to keep living. The muscle that lets me sit in a candlelit room with a grieving parent is the same muscle that brings me to this woman’s door. It rises from something deeper than charity or politics. It is the soft power of one broken-open person recognizing another.

Life will offer each of us an initiation, sometimes more than one. A loss that levels us. A diagnosis that rearranges everything. A reckoning with who we have been. These initiations are not punishments. They are invitations to humility, to vulnerability, to the deepest pain we are capable of bearing.

And also to sight.

Because the people who have surrendered see each other. In infusion rooms and recovery meetings. In candlelit libraries at 6:31 on a weekday evening. In doorways cracked open by frightened hands.

I do not wish suffering on anyone. But I have watched what surrender does. It softens us. It gives us eyes for each other.

The world does not need more armor. It needs more of us who have been humbled and who choose to stay.

Four words, scrawled on the back of a program during a funeral mass. A prayer I will not throw away.

We carry no insignia.

But we know each other at a glance.

Every morning for two years, Miep Gies climbed a narrow staircase in Amsterdam with groceries in her arms. At the top, behind a bookcase, eight people were hiding.

She didn’t know if they would survive. She didn’t know that one of them, a teenage girl, was filling notebook after notebook with words that would one day be read around the world. She knew only the weight of the bags, the creak of the stairs, the faces waiting for her in the dim light of the annex.

Two years of climbing.

Two years of ordinary errands made dangerous.

Two years of not knowing.

When the Gestapo finally came, Miep was not arrested. A small mercy. Afterward, she returned to the ransacked rooms and found Anne’s notebooks scattered on the floor. She gathered them without reading them. She put them in a drawer. She kept them safe for a father who might never return.

He did return. And Miep handed him the notebooks.

She had carried them for months without knowing what they contained. Without knowing they would become one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. She had simply done the next thing. And then the next.

I first watched A Small Light a year ago. At the time, it felt like history. Terrible, luminous, contained.

I watched it again last week, and this time it felt uncomfortably present.

What struck me was not heroism, but texture. How ordinary her courage looked from the inside. Groceries. Paperwork. Small lies told to dangerous people. The way she kept others’ spirits up when her own must have been failing.

It looked, I realized, like the lives many of us are living now. Not the scale. I would never claim that. But the shape. The repetition. The fear. The quiet question that follows you through the day: Does any of this matter?

Miep lived, as we all do, without the ending.

There is a phrase I’ve been carrying for months, written nearly a century ago by Antonio Gramsci from a fascist prison cell: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

For a long time, I thought pessimism was the danger. The thing that leads to paralysis or despair. But Gramsci meant something else. He meant: see it true. Don’t soften it. Don’t tell yourself comforting stories. Look directly at the machinery. At the cruelty. At the power aligned against you.

That kind of clarity is not easy. Once you see, you can’t unsee.

Those pictures carry into the morning. Into conversations where no one wants to talk about it. Into the hours when you are trying to sleep, and the images replay themselves without permission.

And then comes the harder question.

What do you do with what you’ve seen?

I deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave their homes. I show up at protests. I write essays I am never sure anyone reads . I make calls. I sit in chat rooms where everyone is tired.

There are days when this work feels painfully small. When the machinery feels too large, too organized, too protected. My efforts feel like bringing a cup of water to a house fire.

This is the edge where many people step back. Not because they’ve stopped caring, but because they’ve stopped believing their care has consequence . I know that edge. I have stood there myself.

What I’ve come to understand is that the cruelty we are witnessing has a secondary purpose. Beyond its immediate targets, it is trying to teach us something.

Stop caring.

Harden yourself.

Withdraw.

Authoritarian systems have always understood that force alone is not enough. What sustains them is the breaking of the will, the slow erosion of the part of us that believes our actions matter, that stays open when openness is costly, that refuses to abandon others even when abandonment would be safer.

This is what Miep resisted, quietly, day after day.

Every time someone shows up anyway, that lesson is rejected.

On the hardest days, I think of Miep bending down to gather those notebooks. She couldn’t have known what they were. She just sensed they should not be lost.

This is the optimism of the will. The steady decision to remain present. The commitment to do the next necessary thing without knowing where it will lead. The choice to stay human inside conditions that make humanity harder to hold.

Miep lived to be a hundred years old. For decades, people called her a hero. She always resisted the word. “I am not a hero,” she said. “I only did what any decent person would do.”

But not everyone did what she did. Most people looked away. Most people climbed no stairs.

What Miep had was ordinary will, sustained over time, inside impossible circumstances. She was not trying to make history. She was trying to get through the day.

Gramsci wrote that we make history without choosing the conditions we are given.

Miep never chose hers. She chose only whether to climb the stairs.

I don’t know how this story ends. None of us do. That uncertainty is not a flaw. It is the condition of every generation that has ever faced a question larger than itself.

The will is not a private possession. Some days it feels steady. Other days it falters, and we borrow it from one another, passed hand to hand, held for us when our own grip weakens.

Some days, what we are really asking is this: will you hold it for me?

We don’t know how this ends.

Still, we climb the stairs.

A candle in snow.

That’s all.

A single flame on a frozen porch while the storm buries the city in white.

I stood at the window last night and watched it burn. Somewhere in Minneapolis, a man who spent his days saving lives in an ICU was shot ten times by federal agents. He had been filming. He had been trying to help. I cannot hold the smallness of my flame and the enormity of what it answers at the same time, so I hold the flame.

This is what I could do.

Three weeks since the hip replacement. I move through the house carefully now, as if tethered. Outside, the ice would break me. Inside, I rest my hand against the cold glass and watch the world pause under its white cover.

Before the storm, there were 117 families on the Immigrant Pantry waitlist. The call went out quietly but urgently. Three days. Deliver what we can before the ice comes.

Friday morning, Berclair. A neighborhood I know now, after months of this work. The porch steps were broken. I stopped short of them. A woman came to the door. She was not afraid. That openness startled me. When our eyes met, I pressed my hand to my chest.

She had lived here fifteen years, she said. It has never been like this.

Her son-in-law. She searched for words, then let them go. She held her arms out and pressed her wrists together, waiting for me to understand.

Handcuffs.

Two babies, she said. He left two babies.

The words landed between us and did not move.

I wanted to hold her. I wanted her whole story. But I was there to carry groceries to a broken porch before the snow came. That was all. And it was enough. And it was not enough. We stood there together and did not look away.

Now the waitlist grows again. And we cannot go to them.

We are homebound because of the ice. They are homebound too, but for other reasons as well. There are other things moving through the streets now. Unmarked cars. Masks. Fear with no forecast.

This morning, I looked out at the yard, a wide field of white, and saw the bird feeder empty. I had forgotten it before the storm.

My husband scattered wild birdseed across the crusted snow while I watched from inside. The chickadees came first. Then juncos. A cardinal, red against the white, and then his mate. A jay. Three squirrels. Two robins.

I could not look away.

I could not feed my neighbors today.

I could feed the birds.

Last night, watching my single flame, I imagined others. Candles on porches across the country. Small lights, exposed and flickering, easily extinguished.

Yet still burning.

It has never been like this, she said.

No. It has not.

We do what we can, where we are. We light what we can. We feed what we can. We stand at our windows, on our porches, beside broken steps, and we keep our eyes open.

If you are holding a small flame too, stay with it.

Let it burn.

One flame finds another.

Miep Gies was a secretary. That’s what people forget. She wasn’t trained for resistance. She had no particular ideology, no history of activism. She was a woman who typed letters and answered phones, and one day, she looked at a family who needed to be hidden, and she hid them.

George Orwell understood something about this. He wrote about the proles—the ordinary masses who held the only hope for real change but didn’t recognize their own power. He wrote it as tragedy, because he believed they never would. He died before he could see what happens when they do.

There is a moment, in any uprising, when ordinary people cross a threshold they cannot uncross. It looks like a grandmother who has never held a sign, holding one. It looks like a retired veteran standing in the cold because he cannot sit at home. It looks like a woman showing up on a walker ten days after surgery, because staying away has become impossible.

I was at a vigil in Memphis on Sunday. I could stand for perhaps twenty minutes before the nerve in my hip would send electricity down my leg. The parking lot was uneven; I spent most of my time looking at the ground. I had thought I would be embarrassed to be seen this way, unsteady, slow, dependent on a metal frame to stay upright. Instead, I understood that the walker was the point. I was there with whatever body I had. That was the only credential required.

Around me: legal observers in purple vests, faces covered. A makeshift memorial bearing names, not only Renee Nicole Good, shot three times in the face for the crime of witnessing, but others. Candles for six other people. Drums and whistles and signs reading “Ice Out for Good.” And everywhere, the faces of people who had never called themselves activists, who had simply arrived at a line they would not cross.

My friend Sandy, in a purple vest, whispered that they would march to the elementary school. If enough came, they would take the streets. She asked me to pray.

I went home. I climbed into bed, put ice on my hip, and found the livestream.

What I watched: Tennessee Highway Patrol, dozens of vehicles, sirens screaming, descending on the peaceful march from both directions. A car grazed an observer; he fell. A woman stood with her arms out to stop them—when they passed, she knocked on the window. They dragged her out, shoved her into a cruiser. The crowd pressed in, shouting. It felt like the moment before an explosion.

And then the cars reversed. The patrol retreated.

I have thought about that retreat all day because it revealed something about the nature of the power arrayed against us. Even though the woman was still in custody, the community was still under siege, and the fear was still thick in the air.

Orwell wrote about a boot stamping on a human face forever. But the boot depends on our isolation, our exhaustion, our amnesia. It cannot stamp on a face that is surrounded by other faces, all of them watching, all of them refusing to look away. The power that came screaming down the street with its sirens and lights is brittle. It can arrest. It can intimidate. It can kill. What it cannot do is sustain itself against the simple, implacable presence of people who have decided that looking away is no longer an option.

The quiet ones are waking. They look like your neighbor, your coworker, the grandfather at the grocery store. They look like a woman on a walker who shouldn’t have been there but was.

This is how it always begins. With the ordinary—people who, like Miep, simply looked at what was in front of them and could not pretend they hadn’t seen.

The regime’s power is real. But it is thin. And the quiet ones are no longer quiet.

There are years when time moves forward obediently, one date yielding to the next. And there are years like this one, when time gathers into a tight cluster, heavy with meaning, unwilling to be organized.

For me, it begins at Christmas, a season already layered with memory and longing. Then New Year’s, with its insistence on renewal. And then, almost immediately, the days that do not behave like anniversaries at all: January 2, January 3, January 8.

I used to think grief should have one date. One day to circle, one place to return. But grief does not live that way. It disperses itself. It settles into the body, into memory, into the nervous system. These three days each carry a different vibration. Together, they have inscribed a different kind of knowing in me.

January 2 holds the most terror I have ever known.

The call came from a hospital in Blackwell, Oklahoma. They told me my son had been placed on a helicopter bound for Wichita, and that I needed to get there as soon as possible. I remember the words clearly. I also remember leaving my body as I heard them.

There are moments when fear is so absolute it cannot be processed. It simply evacuates you.

That is the day my body remembers. The last ordinary morning. Breakfast at the table. A world still intact. And it is no small thing that my surgery falls on this same date. My mind understands the difference. My body registers the threshold and braces itself.

January 3 carries something entirely different.

This is the date I wear around my neck, etched in gold, close to my pulse. It is the day my son died, after a night on a ventilator, after love kept vigil when hope had narrowed to a single thread.

And yet what I remember most is not terror. It is peace.

I am careful with the word holy, but it is the truest one I have. The terror of the day before had passed, and in its place came a presence so complete it felt like protection. The veil between worlds grew thin, almost porous, and what moved through it was love. Vast. Steady. Enveloping.

I climbed into the hospital bed and spent the night holding him. It was a time of preparing. In order to release him, I needed to know—in my body—that he would be safe. That the love I felt was not ending with him.

The machines breathed. The room was quiet. And somewhere in those hours, I understood that letting go was not abandonment. It was an act of faith so complete it required everything I had.

Letting him go was not a good thing. Nothing about it was good. But it was a holy release.

For years afterward, January 3 became a ritual day. I gathered people in my living room. Cleared the furniture. Built an altar of candles. We wrote down what we were ready to release and what we dared to invite into the coming year. Two fires burned outside, one for letting go, one for welcoming what was new.

It was how I learned to stay in the world.

And then there is January 8.

My son’s twentieth birthday. The day we buried him. Beginning and ending collapsed into a single, unbearable moment.

There is no ceremony that can hold that cruelty. This is the day I simply carry.

I hold all three now. Terror. Holiness. Loss. They do not cancel one another. They coexist. They have become the architecture of how I move through these weeks each year.

As I approach another January 2, another moment when my body will be asked to surrender, I find myself longing for something familiar. This is the hope for the presence that arrived once before, when terror could not survive on its own.

I am not asking for fear to disappear. I am asking to be accompanied.

Perhaps that is what we can offer one another in these dark seasons. Presence, not solutions or certainty. The simple act of saying: I see what you are carrying. You are not alone in it.

These are the days I carry. And in naming them, I am trusting that somewhere, someone is carrying days of their own, and that in this naming, we might find ourselves, for a moment, holding one another up.

(For Robert Moody and Peter Abell, whose leadership has given Memphis a symphony worthy of Handel’s vision - music that does more than entertain, music that opens the heart.)

Last night I went to hear the Memphis Symphony Orchestra perform Handel’s Messiah. I wore a mask. Since my leukemia diagnosis in 2018, I’ve missed most public concerts, and the pandemic deepened that distance. Yet, we decided to go. And I brought something with me: a fragile, 130-year-old vocal score that belonged to my grandfather.

The cover is worn nearly smooth, the binding broken, the pages soft as cloth from being turned so many times. My grandfather was a newspaper editor in Long Pine, Nebraska, a man who set type by hand, whose fingers shaped words in metal. Somehow this score survived, through his life, through my father’s, and now into mine.

I’ve carried it carefully for years. And last night, with the symphony I helped rescue during a financial crisis years ago, I held it in my lap as the lights dimmed.

When I was a child, my father and I would sit in our living room and listen to the 1959 recording of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was always moved by the tenor singing the opening recitative: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.

We listened to that album every December. It became the way we welcomed the season through words repeated twice, as if one offering of comfort could never carry the whole weight of what a heart holds.

One year, I cross-stitched the text for him as a Christmas gift. I wanted him to have something he could touch when the music wasn’t playing.

Years later, when we buried my son Max, I asked Randal Rushing, a well-known tenor in Memphis, to sing it at the funeral.

Before the service began, my father and I were standing together. I leaned close and said quietly, “I want you to know that Randal is going to sing Comfort ye.”

His knees weakened. We had to steady him. He didn’t fall, yet his body knew before his mind could brace for it. This was his grandson, named after him. And we were about to hear the words that had shaped his entire understanding of how love speaks to grief.

Handel composed the Messiah in 1741, completing it in just 24 days. He premiered it in Dublin in April 1742 as a benefit concert for prisoners, the ill, and orphans. It was never intended as performance alone. He meant it to move people toward mercy, to open something inside them that suffering had closed.

He chose to open the entire oratorio with these words from Isaiah 40:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,

and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished,

that her iniquity is pardoned.

I have lived these words for most of my life, and this is how they have come to speak to me:

The repetition is the first truth. Comfort ye, comfort ye. A grieving heart cannot always receive comfort the first time it’s offered. The words come like a steady hand, patient enough to wait.

Love speaks more than once.

The Hebrew word translated as “comfortably” means to the heart. Not to the mind. Not to persuade or instruct. To speak directly to the place where pain lives.

It is an instruction in tenderness: meet pain with softness, with respect for what trauma requires, with the gentleness that allows someone to receive what they cannot yet bear.

This is what I have learned in the work I do, at the door with immigrant families too afraid to leave their homes, at the Christmas basket distribution where hunger is only one kind of need, in every encounter with someone whose life has broken open. You cannot argue someone out of grief. You can only approach it with quiet presence until the heart can hear.

And cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished...

On the surface, this speaks of Israel’s exile ending. But at the depth where grief lives, it means something else:

Your struggle is seen.

Your suffering is acknowledged.

You can lay your weapons down.

This is why my father’s knees gave way at Max’s funeral. In the place where devastation lives, the heart continues to fight-- against reality, against guilt, against time, against the unbearable truth no parent or grandparent can bear.

These words say: “You do not have to fight anymore.”

And when they’re sung, when a human voice carries them into a church holding a young man’s body – they travel directly to the place where love is rawest, where a grandfather can no longer stand upright.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord.

The wilderness is not geography. It is the inner landscape after the world breaks. Silence. Desolation. A sense of wandering without direction.

So the line becomes:

Even here, in this barren place, something sacred is approaching. Clear the path inside yourself so it can reach you.

This is where grief begins its slow transformation toward something that can be carried rather than suffered.

December asks much of us. It carries memory and absence in equal measure. Rituals that continue even when the people we love no longer do. The lights go up. The music plays. The baskets get packed. And underneath it all runs a quiet longing, for what was, for who isn’t here, for the world to grow gentler.

This year feels especially harsh. Families in my city are afraid to open their doors. The rhetoric is brutal. Tenderness has slipped from our public conversations. So many chase the mind, and so few remember the heart.

And yet.

Last night I sat in a church, holding my grandfather’s score – the score of a man who somehow knew this music must be kept. I sat among strangers in a city I love, listening to words written nearly three centuries ago by a composer who believed that music could change people.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.

The tenor sang it twice.

Maybe this is what we hold onto, not that comfort erases pain, but that keeps it returning. Twice. Tenderly. To the heart. Even in the wilderness. Especially there. Not as a single moment of relief, but as a patient, persistent presence that returns until we can finally receive it.

The warfare is not over.

But the invitation remains.

Comfort ye.

Again.

Comfort ye…

.

The translation app on the young girl’s phone glowed between us: We are so sorry we could not answer the door because we were so scared.

She couldn’t have been more than ten. Behind her, through the cracked door, her mother watched with worry etched across her face. We had come with groceries, chosen carefully, familiar foods, things we hoped they would recognize. But when we knocked, the house stayed still. Not a sound. Long minutes while a family of eight held their breath and tried to decide if we were safe.

We were so scared.

That was a week ago, and I cannot stop seeing that child’s face. I cannot stop thinking about what it means for a family to fear kindness, or what it means that a bag of groceries can feel dangerous. I cannot make sense of that reality beside a holiday built around gratitude and gathering.

Because here is what I am carrying into Thanksgiving this year: every day in Memphis, families are being torn apart. Federal agents move through neighborhoods like Berclair, where we deliver food for the Immigrant Pantry, where porches that once held bikes and plastic toys now sit empty. They pull people from church parking lots. They stop fathers on their way to work. They knock on doors, and families freeze because they don’t know if this will be the moment someone disappears.

These are our neighbors. Good people. Steady people. People who came here looking for safety and found something far more fragile.

And tomorrow I am supposed to sit at a warm table and count my blessings.

I don’t know how to hold those two truths at once; how to feel grateful for my own safety while others are afraid to walk to the mailbox; how to gather my family close when other families are being pulled apart. I don’t know how to give thanks while remembering the little girl who apologized for being frightened by a knock at her door.

Maybe that dissonance is the point. Maybe Thanksgiving isn’t meant to be comfortable this year.

What troubles me most is the silence. Not the silence of the family behind their locked door, that silence makes sense. It’s the silence from the people and institutions that should be speaking. Pastors who preach love of neighbor but don’t stand in the parking lots where neighbors are taken. Elected officials who promised to protect these communities but now say little. And the rest of us who feel the ache of what’s happening yet hesitate, unsure what to say or whether our words will matter.

I understand that hesitation. I’ve felt it too. But that little girl’s face will not let me stay in it.

Because silence, however gentle or well meant, is what allows this to continue. Silence is what lets families live in terror while the rest of us move through our days untouched. Silence is what makes it possible to enjoy our abundance while others are too afraid to answer their doors.

And I believe most of us do not want this. I believe most of us are grieving what is happening. We’re simply waiting for permission to say it out loud.

So here is what I’m asking, not as a demand but as an invitation:

Let your silence break.

You don’t need perfect language. You don’t need to be an expert on immigration policy. You only need the willingness to say that this is wrong. That families should not live like this. That children should never have to apologize for being afraid of kindness. That this is not who we want to be.

Say it if you can at your Thanksgiving table. Say it in your congregation. Say it to the people who represent us in government. Just say it. Let your voice be a light in a moment when so many are hidden in the dark.

The little girl is still scared. Her family is still inside. Tomorrow, while we give thanks, the raids will continue.

I cannot carry this alone anymore; none of us can. We need more voices.

This Thanksgiving, let our gratitude break us open. Let it make us brave enough to speak.

Will you?

Each week, I drive my pickup truck through Memphis neighborhoods most people avoid. The truck bears a front plate that reads Team Max, a memorial to my son, and on these missions, it becomes something else, a vessel of love, a bridge between my life and the lives of strangers I’ll never truly know.

I’m part of an underground network of mostly women who deliver groceries to immigrant families too afraid to leave their homes. Since federal agents and the National Guard arrived under the banner of “law and order,” the city’s Latino neighborhoods have been thrown into quiet terror. Families stay behind drawn curtains. Children no longer go to school. A knock at the door might mean deportation.

Our group, known as the Immigrant Pantry, operates through encrypted messaging on Signal. We’re teachers, mothers, social workers, and people who already live close to the edge. We collect food in garages and spare rooms, pack grocery lists at midnight, and drive into neighborhoods watched by federal patrols.

I joined in mid-October, volunteering first to move supplies between bases scattered across Shelby County. At the Collierville base, I met Sandy, one of the organizers, who stored hundreds of cans and bags of rice in her home. When I saw her expansive garage filled wall to wall with food, I felt the same reverence I feel in a chapel.

My first delivery was a family of five: two adults and three children. The list: ground beef, chicken, milk, potatoes, onions, bell peppers, cheese. The pantry provided the canned goods and toiletries. I added the rest.

When I arrived, the street was quiet. I knocked softly. A young woman answered the door, looking at me uncertainly until I said, “Immigrant Pantry.” I made six trips from the truck, unloading food onto her porch. She met my eyes and whispered, “God bless you.”

I drove away trembling, with gratitude, with anger, with awe.

I shop for these families the way I would shop for my own. I stand in the produce section holding avocados, testing their weight, and think about the hands that will slice them open. I buy the good tortillas, the ones that cost more. I add cookies, the ones that my own kids loved. I cannot stop myself from adding one more thing, then another. Juice boxes. Diapers. A bag of apples.

At the register, I watch the total climb past the $50 budget and I don’t care. I pay the difference without thinking. This is not charity. This is what you do when your neighbor’s husband has been taken and she’s alone with children to feed.

The drives to the houses fill me with a strange cocktail of purpose and dread. I’ve learned to notice things: streets where no one is outside, even on warm evenings. Playgrounds empty at 3 p.m. Curtains that don’t move. The neighborhoods feel like they’re holding their breath.

I’ve learned to watch for police cars. To note which corners they favor. To feel my own heartbeat spike when I see one idling a block away. I am a white woman in a pickup truck delivering groceries, and I am afraid. Not for myself, not really, but of what my presence might trigger. Of being watched. Of a patrol car following me to a house and waiting to see who answers the door.

When I knock, I knock softly. I’ve practiced this, not the sharp rap of authority, but something gentler. A request, not a demand. I step back from the door so they can see me through the peephole. I hold up a bag so they know why I’m there.

The door opens just a crack. Always just a crack. I say “Immigrant Pantry” and watch the fear in their eyes shift, from caution to relief. Permission to breathe.

I’ve started to recognize that look. The one that says: “You are not here to take something from me.”

Some of them cry. Some thank God. Some just nod and whisper “gracias” so quietly I almost don’t hear it. One little boy pressed against the window asked his mother something in Spanish. She told me in broken English as she opened the door, her voice soft, “He wonder if you police.”

I am not the police.

I am someone’s mother. I am someone who has buried a son. I am someone who knows what it means to need help, to be too proud to ask for it, and to be broken open by the kindness of strangers.

I carry bags from my truck to their porches, and I think about all the ways we fail each other, and all the small ways we try not to.

Three weeks in, I was assigned a household of nine: two sisters and seven children. Their husbands had both been taken by ICE.

I bought what I’d want if I was alone with children to feed. Forty-seven items. Potatoes, tortillas, diapers, juice boxes, Mexican cookies. I moved through the store in a kind of trance, adding and adding, imagining the week ahead for this family. How do you feed nine people when you’re too afraid to leave the house? How do you tell your children their father isn’t coming home?

When we arrived, the house looked like all the others, small, worn, quiet. A chain-link fence. Peeling paint. Blinds drawn tight.

The young mother opened the door just wide enough to see us. “Immigrant Pantry.” Her shoulders dropped. “Gracias,” she whispered. “Gracias a Dios.”

Her children came to help carry bags. They were so small, struggling with the weight, but they smiled at us. One little girl, maybe six, waved as we got back in the truck.

I thought of that wave for days. The unselfconscious trust of it. The way she didn’t yet understand that the world had decided she didn’t belong here.

The women running this operation are not heads of foundations or large nonprofits. They are teachers and single mothers, people with cracked driveways and broken fences who still find ways to feed others.

I’m learning that real leadership means staying small enough to be useful. To serve without being seen as the one who saves. To let the work speak.

Every week I drive home with an empty truck bed and a full heart. I think about what it means to show up. To be a body that says: “You are not alone. You are not forgotten.”

A gallon of milk, two dozen eggs, a bag of onions and potatoes—this is the language of love. It will not change federal policy or dismantle cruelty, but it keeps children fed. It reminds families that they are seen.

You can be that person too.

Find your local mutual aid network. Text a friend and start one. Buy extra milk. Knock on a door.

In Memphis, we meet in encrypted messages and unmarked garages. We’re teachers, mothers, retired executives, people who drive pickups with front plates honoring their son’s unfinished work. We’re ordinary people refusing to accept cruelty as normal.

The question isn’t whether your small act matters.

The question is: when they came for your neighbors, what did you do?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I have been afraid to write.

This admission sits heavy on the page, a confession I never imagined making. For weeks, my fingers hovered over the keyboard, sentences dissolving before they reached the screen. I told myself I was being prudent, careful. The truth is simpler: I have been scared.

The fear has a geography. It lives in the space between my desire to speak and the knowledge that we are living through what the New York Times editorial board recently called “a perilous time.” It grows in the shadow of weapons on our streets and a president who speaks openly of retribution against those who hold what he terms “liberal views.” It feeds on reports of federal officials pressuring companies to fire workers for their opinions, of regulators threatening media outlets with government retaliation, of systematic targeting of nonprofits whose crime is believing that democracy requires more than one voice.

But today something shifted. My former professor at Harvard, Robert Reich, sent out a call that cut through my paralysis: Keep speaking up. Three words that contain the entire weight of what it means to live in a democracy under strain.

It reminded me of an earlier essay I titled Courage Is Contagious. I believed then, as I must believe now, that democracy does not depend on the fearless but on the frightened who act anyway.

Let me pause on what I mean by liberal, since the word has become weaponized. To me, it is not an ideology of extremes but a moral commitment: to those without my advantages, to institutions that bind us together, to America’s strength not only in power but in conscience. These positions are, in fact, deeply conservative in the truest sense; they seek to conserve the ideals that have made America a beacon for those seeking freedom, opportunity, and justice.

Yet to speak them aloud now feels like stepping into a minefield. The current administration has made clear that such positions are not legitimate discourse but evidence of what one of its advisers calls a “vast domestic terror movement.” This is the language of authoritarianism, the deliberate conflation of dissent with danger. I t is meant to make us afraid to question, to protest, to speak.

Here is what silence has taught me: fear is contagious. But so is courage.

When we retreat into whispers and private worries, we cede the public square to those who would reshape it in their image. Democracy does not collapse all at once; it erodes voice by voice, as each citizen decides the risk of speaking is too great. Authoritarians count these silences as victories.

Consider Charlie Kirk’s assassination. His murder was horrific precisely because it was the ultimate violation of democratic principles, the silencing of a voice through violence. Yet instead of responding with a defense of free expression, the administration has used the tragedy as a pretext to silence more voices, targeting organizations whose only connection to violence is their commitment to democracy itself.

The intimidation is not abstract. Here in Memphis, we await the arrival of the National Guard, despite our mayor and city leaders fervently asking them not to come. It is political theater designed to scare a majority-black city with a long history of grit and civil rights leadership. We do not need soldiers on our streets. We need investment in children living in poverty, safe and affordable housing, and economic opportunities. We need to curb the availability of guns.

Instead, we are given a show of force meant to warn other communities across America: dissent will be met with intimidation.

The antidote to fear is not fearlessness. It is community. It is the knowledge that when one voice rises, others find the courage to join. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires each of us to show up, to speak, to stand for the values we claim to hold.

I write now as an act of faith. Faith that courage, once expressed, spreads. Faith that democracy, however fragile, is still worth defending. Faith that the America I believe in is possible if enough of us are willing to risk raising our voices.

The cursor no longer blinks in empty space. The words are here, imperfect but present, afraid but unsilenced. Courage is contagious.

May these words carry the infection forward.

If you’ve read this far, if these words resonate with your own fears and hopes, if you, too, believe that democracy requires our voices even when speaking feels risky, then let me know you’re part of this community.

Because that’s how we build the courage to keep going. Together, one voice at a time, one connection at a time.

The hawk knows I’m coming.

Each morning before dawn, when the fog still clings to the mountains like a whispered secret from the Pacific, I drive through the sleeping village toward water. The hawk sits sentinel in the live oak beside the pool, watching as I slip into lane three and push off into liquid salvation.

We came to Carmel to escape the heat of Memphis and to be near our boys. And to heal. The treatments that conquered one enemy had awakened another—my immune system, now overactive and zealous, turning its newfound strength against my joints and lungs. This is the particular irony of survival: the medicine that grants you more time can also reshape how you’ll spend it. Swimming became not a choice but a necessity, the one form of motion my body could still endure.

The pool is heated to exactly eighty degrees, a temperature that speaks directly to inflamed tissue. Those first hundred yards are a negotiation; my shoulders protesting, my knees sending sharp reminders of their discontent. But somewhere in that second length, something shifts. The water receives my weight and transforms it into grace. My lungs, remember their rhythm. I become what I was meant to be: a creature designed for flow.

The morning swimmers are already legends to me. Sue arrives at 5:30 sharp, claiming lane four with the quiet authority of someone who has shown up every day for years. Lisa, the former triathlete in lane five, cuts through the water with mechanical precision, her body still remembering races from decades past. Sylvia takes lane one not to compete but simply to appear, to mark another day with intentional movement. We nod to each other in the pre-dawn darkness, members of an unspoken sisterhood of those who choose water over sleep, hope over surrender.

I have been thinking about muscle and memory, about the way the body learns to trust again. In Memphis, I discovered that building strength requires breaking down first, the controlled destruction that precedes growth. But my joints, already bearing the cost of my survival, couldn’t withstand more breaking. The gym became another site of negotiation with a body that had been asked to bear too much and was now setting its own terms.

Here in the water, the rules change. Buoyancy offers what gravity cannot: the chance to move without the full weight of consequence. Each stroke is both surrender and assertion, a daily practice in believing that healing might be possible even when we cannot name what we’re healing from.

The ritual never varies: arrive before the village stirs, slip into the 55-degree morning air in nothing but a swimsuit, tuck my hair into my cap, adjust my goggles, and push off. For thirty minutes or sometimes an hour, I am a dolphin—sleek and graceful, everything working in harmony. The mountain juts straight up beside the pool like an ancient promise. The water holds me as I glide from wall to wall, counting not laps but moments of perfect synchronization between breath and movement.

I rise each morning to first light and find myself eager for the water in a way that surprises me. This is not the relentless optimism of someone who refuses to acknowledge difficulty, but something quieter—the simple pleasure of a body that can still glide through water, of lungs that can still fill completely, of a heart that pounds not with anxiety but with effort chosen freely.

October 1st looms like a deadline I’m not ready to meet. Return to Memphis means returning to the familiar routines, the old negotiations between what my body wants to do and what it can actually accomplish. But I am taking something back with me that cannot be packed: the knowledge that healing is not always about fixing what is broken. Sometimes it is about finding the way in which broken things can still move beautifully.

The hawk will remain in its oak, watching other swimmers learn to trust the water. But I will carry the memory of these mornings—the fog lifting to reveal mountains that jut skyward without apology, the sound of water accepting bodies that have forgotten their own grace, the quiet courage of women who show up in the darkness to practice hope one stroke at a time.

I am not sure if I am healing, but I am swimming. In Carmel, I have learned, sometimes that is the same thing.

It started with a phone call.

Max was halfway through his freshman year at the University of Denver when he called me with a new idea. That wasn’t unusual. My sons were known for calling with big ideas, the kind that arrived full of urgency, often fading just as quickly. But this one felt different. He said he wanted to come home. He said he wanted to transfer to Rhodes College and work in the inner city.

I listened. I asked him to write down his plan, what he hoped to do, why he felt this pull. To my surprise, he did. A page of intent, carefully considered. He even took it to his father and talked it through. Soon, he had applied and been accepted to Rhodes. Then he came to me again, this time with a more practical request: Could I help him find a place to volunteer? Somewhere that mattered.

I called Ken Bennett at Streets Ministries, a nonprofit located across from the former Foote Homes, one of Memphis’s largest public housing complexes. Streets had a gym, classrooms, a tutoring center, and a spirit of welcome. Ken agreed to meet Max. He was hard to miss—six-foot-eight, quiet, kind. Not someone you expected to find walking the blocks of South Memphis with a former gang member. But that’s what he did. Delvin Lane, his boss, took him under his wing. Max mentored kids on the basketball court. He tutored. He walked door-to-door with Delvin to invite kids to Streets. He found another opportunity tutoring Hispanic children in Hickory Hill.

He never moved into the dorms at Rhodes. His frame didn’t fit the twin beds, so he lived at home. And I am forever grateful for that.

That summer stretched from June to December 2008. It was the last full season I had with my son. And in that time, something took root.

In May 2009, a few months after Max died, I got a call from Preston Battle, one of Max’s best friends. He wanted to know how he and others could keep giving back the way Max had. It wasn’t just Preston. A wave of Max’s friends and acquaintances wanted to act. But we didn’t want another nonprofit. We didn’t want structure. We wanted movement.

That’s how Team Max was born.

We called it vigilante philanthropy—pop-up service. We created a Facebook group. When a need came up, we posted. People showed up. No long meetings, no gatekeeping. Just a call and a response. Within a few months, over 1,500 people had joined.

The work we did was gritty, joyful, often beautifully improvised. We cleaned neighborhoods with Clean Memphis. We took a tree off an elderly couple’s house after a storm. We packed supplies after the Joplin, Missouri tornado. We filled a FedEx 18-wheeler with medical supplies for Haiti after the earthquake, each box with Max’s face on the label.

We showed up for LeBonheur Children’s Hospital with books and stuffed animals. We gave our time to St. Jude. And every Thanksgiving, we took over MIFA’s Meals on Wheels program. Volunteers arrived before sunrise. We began with music, reflection, and a call to purpose. Then we fanned out across Memphis, delivering meals, always finished before noon, so families could return to their own.

But the most astonishing moment came in 2012, on the third anniversary of Max’s death.

I wanted to do something bold. Something Max would have loved. So I hired the Memphis Symphony Orchestra to perform at the Union Mission shelter for the homeless, where we had served many times.

I asked them to begin with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

The brass. The timpani. A summons into the world.

We were sitting in a homeless shelter, a space of vulnerability, weariness, and resilience. And there it was: Copland’s triumphant call rising in that space. I wondered if he ever imagined his music would one day open a concert surrounded by so many “common men,” not in the abstract, but in the flesh, the lived, the real. It was as if the music had returned to its rightful home.

Then James Gholsen, the principal clarinetist, an African American musician of rare sensitivity, played the second movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A. The room grew hushed, breath held in reverence, as if everyone knew something sacred was passing through us. It was a human cry.

In between, a 19-year-old homeless man named Darrell read one of Max’s poems. My mother read another.

I had found them in a spiral notebook tucked inside Max’s backpack, the same backpack thrown from the car during the accident, charred with soot and smoke from the fire. I had never seen the poems before. The highway patrol brought them to me, and when I opened the notebook, there they were. Words written in his hand. Quiet declarations from a heart still learning how to speak. One of them read:

The bravest, most defiant

Most admirable endeavor

A human being can

Embark upon

Is the solemn vow to love

Every moment,

Every living breath.

We ended with the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Ode to Joy, sung in German by a full choir hidden in the balcony. When they rose and sang, the room shook.

Beethoven’s Ninth is a journey. From darkness into light. From isolation into kinship. It carries the pulse of longing and the triumph of spirit. That day, in that room, the music seemed to gather every sorrow and lift it, reshaping grief into something radiant. No one needed to speak German to understand. The message was carried in the vibration of voices, the lift of the strings, the thunder of the choir: You are not alone.

I had intentionally mixed the seating: homeless guests and symphony patrons, side by side. Wealth and poverty, grief and music, all in one sanctuary.

One man told me he came in expecting to fall asleep when he saw the violins. He assumed he’d be seated in the back, like always. But we had placed the homeless guests front and center, scattered throughout. He noticed. He listened. And afterward, he gave me the biggest hug and said, “That band is tight!”

I can still hear his voice.

There is more to tell. But the heart of it remains the same: one young man, one simple plan, and a community that continues to rise in his name.

Today, all our efforts have poured into what has become the largest and most impactful Team Max tradition: the annual Christmas food basket distribution.

This year will be our biggest yet. Over 7,000 families will receive baskets filled with love, nourishment, and hope. But food insecurity is growing. The need is real, and we cannot meet it alone.

Each basket costs $50. Each one feeds a family. We need you! Your hands, your hearts, your support.

Come join us. Volunteer. Donate. Share this story. Be part of the joy that lifts a city.

Because even after tragedy, love moves.

And when we move with it, so does the world.

Donate to Team Max here.

There are certain people so deeply woven into the fabric of a city that it’s hard to imagine the place without them. Fred Smith was one of those people for Memphis.

He was more than a CEO or a visionary entrepreneur, though he was certainly both. He was something more elemental: a builder of belief. In himself and in the city that raised him, and in the people whose lives were transformed by his vision.

Today, Memphis grieves. And beyond mourning the loss of a global business leader, we’re mourning a man who, for nearly five decades, stood like a steady current beneath the psyche of our city; a quiet, unwavering force of possibility and hope.

I met Fred 46 years ago, shortly after moving to Memphis to work for the Memphis Arts Council. Over the years, I came to know Fred and his wife Dianne not as public figures, but as people. And in those glimpses behind the scenes, I saw a man who was loyal, curious, quick to laugh, deeply protective of his family, and generous with his time and trust.

When I lost my son Max, Fred called me. He had lost his daughter, Wendy, and he knew the terrain. “Gayle,” he said, “it’s awful. It’s just awful.” There were no platitudes. He offered presence. And then he told me something I’ve never forgotten: “You’ll never get over it, but you will learn to live with it.” Even in grief, he told the truth.

Fred showed up in so many ways.

He showed up in a sweltering gym at Treadwell High School, sitting on hard bleachers to watch his son Cannon and my son Max play basketball together. He showed up when the Memphis Symphony Orchestra was on the brink of collapse, helping us imagine a partnership with the University of Memphis that still sustains the symphony to this day. He picked up the phone, created momentum, and then quietly stepped back. That was his style.

He wasn’t a season ticket holder. He didn’t pretend to be a symphony patron. But he understood something essential: that if Memphis was going to compete, recruit, and retain talent, we needed a professional orchestra. For the largest employer in Memphis, the arts are not window dressing; they are the foundation.

Once, I teased him about the constant stream of FedEx planes flying over my house at 3:30 in the morning, no matter where I lived in Memphis. He smiled and said, “Gayle, that’s the sound of money.” But I think it was more than that. It was the sound of movement. Of ambition. Of an idea that took flight and never looked back.

He carried his visibility with grace and a wry sense of humor. I remember sitting next to him at a game when a parent came over, shook his hand, and handed him a résumé. Afterward, I said, “It must be hard to be you.” Fred laughed and told me that once, while being wheeled into surgery, wearing a paper hat, blue gown, and a thin sheet over his body, the man pushing the gurney leaned down and asked if he could give him his résumé. We laughed hard. It was hard to be Fred Smith. But he bore it with patience and perspective.

And there’s one night I’ll never forget.

Dianne and I went out to hear her father, a jazz trombone player, perform in a club. Fred stayed home to watch the kids. When we returned, baby Samantha was in his arms as he read a heavy tome of history. And there, in the elegant entry hall of their home, a chaotic scene lay abandoned: a Barbie swimming pool filled with a half-dozen naked dolls, some floating face down. I still laugh when I picture it. But more than anything, I remember how it felt. That night, it was clear: in this household, family mattered more than pretense. Even in a world that demanded polish and power, love came first.

So what does it mean when a city loses its hero?

It means we pause. We remember. And we ask ourselves who we want to become in the shadow of that loss. Fred never asked for a spotlight. He simply moved, decisively, generously, with vision. Memphis is different because he lived here. I am different because I knew him.

And tonight, as the planes hum overhead, I hear more than money.

I hear the heartbeat of a city; grieving, grateful, and still rising.