The notebook · September 20, 2026

The Tense I Changed

There is a name on my list I have been carrying long enough that I no longer have to think about it. It comes on its own, in its place, between two others.

The night before last I stopped on it. I had said “he loved that” where I used to say “he loves that”, and I heard the change while I was making it. Not afterwards. During. Two syllables, and the tense had moved.

It was not a decision. I did not decide that. The grammar settled it on its own, on an ordinary weeknight, without asking me anything, and what unsettled me is not the sadness of the past tense. It is that a verdict had been handed down somewhere without me. My language had closed a question my prayer does not close at all: I go on naming him before God in the present tense of someone being looked after.

I tried to go back. The next evening, deliberately, I said the sentence again in the present. It rang false. Not false like a lie, false like a pose, that slightly careful voice you put on when you want to believe harder than you believe. I heard myself pushing. I stopped.

There is that line of Jesus, in Luke, when someone hands him a piece of casuistry about the resurrection: “Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him” (Luke 20:38, World English Bible). It does not say they lived. It says they are alive, present tense, and the verb is there on purpose. But the sentence is true from God’s side, and I am speaking from mine, where he is missing. I have not known what to do with it. I am keeping it anyway.

So since then I manage differently, and it is not a reconciliation, it is a detour. I say his name, then what I am entrusting, without going through a verb that has to pick a side. “Him, and everything there was.” It holds.

I have not found the right tense. I have found a sentence that does not ask for one, and I suspect it is temporary.

In Manna, tonight, I will name him again. Without conjugating.