While the Chairs Are Still Full
On family, fragile joy, and loving one another while we can
By Tim Auman
The older I get, the easier it has become to be moved—sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes to tears—by sweet and ordinary things: a conversation in the car with my youngest son, Micah; a quiet moment alone as the sun peeks over the horizon; the familiar voice of my oldest friend who lives in another state.
Perhaps age does this to us. We begin to understand the contrast between the way life actually unfolds—with its customary hardness, disappointments, losses, and sharp edges—and those tiny islands of tenderness that somehow remain. A hand reaching across a table. Someone laughing in the next room. A familiar voice saying our name. Morning light spilling through a window. Sometimes I think the tears come because I am grieving the lost innocence of the world.
It is especially difficult when I look deeply into the eyes of my children and stepchildren. I know something they do not yet fully know. I know how much life will ask of them. I know there will be losses they cannot imagine, disappointments they cannot prepare for, and complicated griefs that will leave their marks. Every life, no matter how fortunate, eventually gathers a few scars.
Recently, my immediate family gathered at Kure Beach on the North Carolina coast. We sat on the beach, played in the surf, walked along the boardwalk, ate together, and gathered around the dining room table to play Apples to Apples. It was wonderfully silly. Everyone was laughing and teasing and arguing their case for why their card was obviously the best one. And as I sat there watching the people I love, I suddenly felt a deep ache inside. For just a moment, I found myself thinking about all they will have to go through before life shows them the exit door.
One of my favorite artists is Carl Larsson (1853–1919), the Swedish painter whose watercolors are filled with similarly tender scenes of family life. Again and again, he painted parents and children gathered around tables—eating, reading, celebrating, talking, simply being together. What makes the paintings even more moving is that Larsson was not painting some imagined family. He was painting his own. He and his wife, Karin, had eight children, and over the years his art became a kind of visual love letter to the ordinary life they shared.
In Breakfast Under the Big Birch, the family gathers around a simple outdoor table beneath the spreading branches of a birch tree. Nothing monumental is happening. Children crowd together. Adults linger nearby. Even the family dog joins the gathering. It feels wonderfully lived-in. The children are beautiful in that particular way children are beautiful when they still feel at home in the world. They love their parents, their siblings, their surroundings, and their dog. And their parents, clearly, love them back with all their hearts. Looking at them, it is difficult to imagine the hardships that eventually found their way into those lives. And perhaps that is part of what touches me.
Sitting around the table with my own family, playing a silly card game, I found myself strangely grateful that I had not been given their stories—our stories—from the beginning. If, when they were little, someone had handed me a book containing every heartbreak, disappointment, illness, loss, and goodbye waiting for us, I don't know how I could have looked into their young faces without weeping. Maybe we are not meant to know. Maybe love requires a certain blessed unknowing.
The wide-eyed children beneath Larsson's birch tree are also us. We were once those children. And perhaps we deserve far more tenderness than we usually give ourselves—for everything we have carried since those early, innocent days, for the losses we survived, for the disappointments we absorbed, for the ways we kept getting out of bed and trying again. Most of us have done nothing especially horrific. It is simply that, sooner or later, the world breaks all of our hearts.
And perhaps this is why we keep gathering—under birch trees, around dining room tables, on porches and beaches, and in pews on Sunday mornings. We gather because broken hearts need other broken hearts nearby. We gather because laughter does not erase sorrow, but somehow makes it bearable. We gather because love cannot protect the people we cherish from every wound, but it can sit beside them when the sharp edges cut deep.
And every once in a while, in the middle of a silly game around a dining room table, we look at the faces we love and feel that familiar ache. Our eyes moisten. And for one brief, luminous moment, we understand: This is fragile. This is beautiful. Someday, the chairs around the table will be empty. So while we are here, huddle close and love one another fiercely.
Reflection Questions
1) Who are the people sitting around the table of your life right now, and what do you want to be sure they know while the chairs are still full?
2) Looking back over your life, what heartbreaks have made you more tender—not only toward others, but toward the younger version of yourself who could not have known what was coming?
3) If the fragility of life is not simply something to fear but an invitation to love more deeply, what might it mean for you to “huddle close and love fiercely” today?
