Used Car for Sale
David R. Weiss – January 9, 2026
Margaret and I have been (happily) a one-car family for a dozen years now. But recently, with my dad’s increasing health challenges, my trips to Michigan City to help care for him have become more frequent and longer. Leaving Margaret carless for days, even weeks at a time. Friends have been very generous lending us the use of a car as needed, but we’ve been thinking about adding a second car to remove one point of complexity from our schedules.
Thus, when Margaret saw a Facebook post by a friend looking to sell a car, it caught her eye. And her heart. Karen, the seller, was a high school classmate of Margaret. Not close friends, but they sang in choir together and had overlapping friend circles. They’ve been Facebook friends for the past decade. Margaret had seen last spring that Karen’s husband, Mike, was battling cancer—and then that he had died in early November. By mid-December Karen was ready to sell his car.
The two of them traded several messages and phone calls and soon agreed on the purchase. But Karen lives near Omaha, Nebraska—a 400-mile drive from St. Paul. So, we weren’t able to schedule the actual purchase and pick-up until the second week of January. When Margaret and Karen hugged hello on January 9, it was long and heavy with emotion. This sale was another step in Karen’s grieving. A good step, but a teary one, nonetheless.
I was almost just a third wheel as the two women reconnected over high school memories—but that didn’t last long as Karen shared more about Mike’s cancer journey. He was first diagnosed with high-risk prostate cancer in 2017. His Gleason score (a measure of the cancer’s aggressiveness) was 9, the same score as mine is. Mike “beat” the prostate cancer. He had hormone treatment and radiation, just like me, and chemo on top of that. His cancer remained undetectable until 2025 when it “reappeared” in his liver. Except it turned out this wasn’t a metastatic prostate cancer it was an entirely new cancer. It was this second cancer—and the unanticipated side effects of treatment for it—that eventually took his life.
We only spent about an hour together. But the words shared in both directions were rich with feeling for all three of us. By the time we completed the purchase at the bank it seemed as though money was the least of what was changing hands. When Karen first took us into the garage to show us the car, she opened the door and said, with reverent gravity, “This is the car Mike drove.” This poem recounts that day.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind atwww.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
