Mimi's Smile and the Long Work of Being Known

Something has been pulling these threads together in my mind today, and I think I finally see what connects them.

The deathbed image keeps coming back. Mimi's face above me, smiling. I don't know exactly where it came from, but I know what it means: that she stayed, and that she was glad she did. That's the whole ambition, really. Not a legacy or a balance sheet — just that one face, at that one moment, meaning what it would mean.

What I didn't expect was how far I was from that not long ago. And how much of the distance was something I built myself.

Self-sufficiency felt like survival. I learned it early, from real circumstances, and it worked well enough that I kept using it long after the emergency was over. But a man who is his own shepherd is doing a job that was never his. The exhaustion of that role is its own testimony. I think about Psalm 23 differently now — not as a comfort verse, but as a quiet diagnosis. The shepherd leads, restores, knows where the water is. The sheep's job is to follow. I spent decades refusing that arrangement, deciding God's timing was a problem I needed to solve myself, skipping prerequisites because the waiting felt unreasonable. Abraham did the same thing, and the wound from that impatience echoed for generations.

What it cost the people closest to me — that's the part I'm still sitting with. My first marriage let me stay that version of myself. I was tolerated, which meant I was never really pressed. I wonder now how Angie actually experienced me, and I can't go back to find out. But Mimi won't let me disappear into that self-sufficient shell. She pushes back, she names things, she refuses to absorb what I haven't dealt with. It's not comfortable. It's also the first time I've understood what it means to be genuinely known rather than just accommodated. Only real love will do that, I think. Tolerance would have been easier for both of us, and it would have cost me everything.

What's strange is how this connects to something larger than marriage. It occurred to me today that maybe we prepare ourselves to understand God by first learning to understand people. And the more I sit with that, the more it seems right — we're made in God's image, which means genuine understanding of another person is always tracing something divine. Jesus at the well, asking a Samaritan woman for water. Jesus stopping on the road to ask a blind man what he wanted, a question he obviously didn't need to ask if the point was just information. The asking was the ministry. The presence, the listening, the willingness to be in the moment with someone — that was the whole thing.

Listening to Mimi's hurt without defending myself first is the same posture. It's not just marriage work. It's the same practice, the same direction.

So the deathbed image is not just a sentimental hope. It's a demand. It tells me what kind of man I have to keep becoming — not self-sufficient, not fast, not forcing God's hand — but present, listening, willing to be known and to know. The face in that vision is the finish line, and I'm closer than I was, and I'm not taking that for granted.