Live faithfully a hidden life

Julia ♦ November 14, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

Update for 2023: Since this post takes a slightly different form, I wanted to add a note at the beginning, to make it obvious that the text below describes our circumstances in 2016, soon after Jeff’s death. 

Dear friends, thanks for visiting us today. We are still struggling with our loss, but surviving. Right now I am completely consumed with various tasks — catching up on school work, with three major papers, much reading, and several smaller assignments yet to complete; dealing with the seemingly endless paperwork that goes with my new life circumstances; taking care of Matt without the nurturing help and loving presence of Jeff; managing (as well as I can) two homes; and just generally trying to get through the grief. I ask your patience as I re-blog a post that has been on my mind a lot lately, that features one of my all-time favorite quotes. Since it’s almost four years old, perhaps there will be many of you who never saw it, and many others who have forgotten it. Meanwhile, please know that I appreciate your comments, thoughts, prayers and warm wishes, and will answer each and every comment as soon as I can! As Marlene says, Giant Hugs!

Calligraphy artist, Chinatown, San Francisco 2004

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
—George Eliot, from the closing lines of Middlemarch

Look around you today.  You are surrounded by saints, cleverly disguised as fallible human beings.  Indeed, you may be one yourself.

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.