Today, before I leave for Ellsworth to judge the Poetry Out Loud regionals, I plan to spend a little time with Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur.

It occurred to me last night, as I sat among the Stutzman family, playing music and eating lashing of desserts donated by anxious friends (who, when all else fails and they can't think of anything else to do, show up on the doorsteps of the bereaved with yet another pie), that watching this child die has been an ordeal analogous to the sorts of ordeals one finds in Malory. The knight crosses into the dark wood, he meets the black knight, something life-changing happens--death, victory, magical intervention--and then the knight crosses out of the wood. In other words, the ordeal is terrible but it has finite edges. Of course a new ordeal may begin just beyond the next grove of trees, but for the moment the knight looks up into the sky, and the world really is what it seems to be.

I felt last night as if the family had reached the far edge of the ordeal, that they were beginning to look up into the sky, to rediscover a world beyond their terrible, hallucinatory battle with the black knight. This is not to say that they have shed their scars. That, of course, is impossible. Simply they are looking up and outward again, after many months of doing neither.