Dodie Little, from Trinity. Inside was a cooked chicken, potato
salad, green beans and brownies. I realized that had she not
brought it to us, we would not have eaten.

In the week ahead, I could hardly bear to be in church. I
couldn't be in large rooms or with many people at once. I
suffocated on the living. I believed no one noticed, until Mark
Asman took me aside and said, "Are you having trouble with crowds
since Kit died?"

I felt as if I was wandering around in a newly discovered
archeological dig where there are pieces of things all over the
ground--pottery shards, abandoned campsites, and bones--and
that someday someone would come along and make sense of
them.

I would be watering the garden or opening an envelope and
Kit's death would spring on me completely new and jolting, as if
I'd been hit hard from behind with no warning, and I then
would fold up, like a fan.

Parts of my life, the life I led before Kit grew sick and died,
no longer made sense. A life of meetings, stretched between
appointments, always ten minutes late. Half listening to people.
A life dictated by clocks and money and computers and cars,
without hawks and lakes and wild roses, a world increasingly
without surprise or humor. I thought of how we as a species
have endangered not only animals and plants around us, but the
wild nature of our own lives. We have fabricated this world, to
paraphrase the writer Philip Sherrard, and our punishment is
that we have to adapt to it.

I half realized, as I stood in the wreckage of my brother's
death, that I had lost more than Kit; I'd lost my own wild life, I'd
lost the sacred in the world. By the life I was leading, I had lost
much of the holy, and my job now, if one could call it a job, was
to find it again but in a different place.

I thought of a story about Dan Corrigan, a retired Episcopal
bishop. Dan was famous in the church for breaking rules. He had

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Excerpts from Practicing Resurrection ©2003 by Nora Gallagher are used with permission from Knopf Publishers.

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