Living with Limits

“I don’t have all the time in the world, but I have all night.”

            James Dickey, “The Cancer Match”

I have learned that there is a kindness in announcing limits. To a dear friend who would love a sympathetic ear for four hours straight if she could get it, whose childhood was stolen by abuse, who needs to tell her story again and again, I have learned to say as she picks up the phone, “I have about a half hour before a meeting. I just wanted to hear your voice.” To a child who wants to make cupcakes, who loves to stir and stir, who takes a two whole minutes to break the eggs one by one, I have learned to say, “It’s 3:45 right now. Let’s see if we can get these in the oven by 4:00.” To my hospice patient, suffering not only from her own fluctuating dementia but from the varieties of abjection she sees around her in the “activity room” every day, and who keeps inviting me to stay for dinner, I have learned to say, “I’m so happy to be here. I’m going to stay another 15 minutes. Then I have to go home and make dinner for my husband. But I’ll be back tomorrow.” “Tomorrow,” I have learned, may need to mean “whenever I can get back this week.” If I say “Thursday,” her face falls. Thursday, even if it’s Wednesday, seems a long way away. But tomorrow is pretty soon.

Every time I have read James Dickey’s “Cancer Match” I have paused over this line. “I don’t have all the time in the world, but I have all night.” I remember “all night” when my dad lay dying and I stayed in the room with him while Mom, exhausted, finally went elsewhere to sleep. I remember “all night” when my daughter was giving birth. They told her the baby would come any time now around 9:00 pm. At 3:00 a.m. I was still brushing damp hair from her forehead and whispering mantras about breathing that seemed to help.

We give what we have, willingly, to those for whom we believe we would do “anything.” I have learned the emptiness, though, of that promise: “I’d do anything for you, dear” is a good line in a song, but we can’t. We won’t always be there for our children when they hurt, or our parents when their hold on life becomes tenuous or for students who are feeling desperate or patients in panic. We will be there when we can, when we have the energy, when competing commitments can somehow be shoved aside.

Christina Rosetti’s poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a Christmas poem, assigns to a child the question, “What can I give him, poor as I am?” and continues, “If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.” But he’s not. What he has is a few hours of his time and a curious heart. So he shows up at the site of a sacred event in a sacred moment, to witness, open to a mystery, uncertain about its meaning, resolved, at least to “give him my heart.”

I find myself discouraged, often, by how little I can manage to attend to the needs of people I care about—some of them needs I could meet, if I had “world enough and time.” But I have learned to allay some of that discouragement by more humbly acknowledging limits, hoping the honesty of that acknowledgement might make even a very limited gift acceptable and enough. When a young person calls on behalf of the League of Conservation Voters or the Food Bank and tells me what amount they hope we can give, I have learned, instead of beginning with “No,” to say “Here’s what we can do this time. I wish it could be more.” I have limits. Perhaps I can stretch them. But respecting them, I have learned, is generally wiser than pretending they’re not there. Because I don’t have all the time in the world. But I have this whole hour, this day. The duration of one cup of coffee. The time it takes to listen to one more winding sentence, or to stay with a child on her slow way to sleep.