Thursday VI: epilogue

It would seem an appropriate place to end a story: the confrontation has taken place, the secret is revealed. But a diagnosis isn’t a cure. To live in this world you must understand how it works, but once you’ve discovered this, your understanding calls for a decision, an action. And some insights are accompanied by an imperative to change.

After the encounter a time of unrest followed for our community. There were those who would have preferred to carry on as if nothing had changed. I thought it unlikely that there would be consequences from the others if we did. We could have carried on with the meetings, sounded out the words and ignored the knowledge we gained, without ever having to expect them in our gardens again. What I could not see was how we could do that without being consumed by shame. I understood for the first time that there were people for whom the language was of secondary concern, who relied on the community as the guiding principle of their lives. For them, the revelation did not change anything. What did they care about the truth, when their way of life, their source of order and companionship, was being threatened? They were set dead against any kind of change in the system, and would scarcely tolerate talk of it. Vero belonged to this group. It hurt me to see someone I would have trusted with my life turn against the facts like that, to hold onto something that had changed irrevocably from the moment the forest entered our kitchen.