The Half Left Unsaid
David R. Weiss – June 24, 2026

[NOTE: my earlier piece, “A Canopy of Golden Leaves,” provides a little more background on my friendship with Marguerite.]

These days Marguerite is the embodiment of liminal. More than simply living at the edge of dying, she is that edge. It’s my honor to occasionally keep her company there.

In a conservatory, you might enter a room kept warm and humid, and all of sudden you find yourself wrapped in a pungent fecund embrace that is oh so welcoming, while perhaps simultaneously feeling just a bit too much.

Right now, Marguerite’s room is like that. The waiting, the weariness, and the anticipation of Something Next is almost overpowering in intensity. It is surely holy.

Silence is sovereign these days. This morning I shared some photos of me and my son Ben through the years—he turns 39 today. And I showed some pictures from the recent trip Margaret and I made to California to visit our daughter Susanna. She joined me to look at the pictures and listen to the tales of our vacation adventures, several times voicing genuine delight.

But the Silence hovers. Not as threat or peril, mind you. Simply as the ever-present dawning of Something Next. Something beyond words. It waits patiently for my prattling to exhaust itself. And at the first break in conversation, it overfills the room again.

Marguerite herself reaches for words several times, but there is always a half left unsaid.

“Do you think this afternoon …”

“Have you ever …”

“Could we …”

“What I’d really like …”

Each time she begins in earnest, seemingly assured of the full sentence. But she never gets past the introductory clause before the Silence settles in. At some point she looks me straight on—her visage caught between frustration and Something mystical. She begins again, “Now, this is what I’m experiencing …”   Her gaze held steady, as her words halted, seeming almost to plead with me.

This is the first half-thought—the only half-thought—I dare to complete: “It’s as though you get half-way into a sentence and then can’t find the other half.” She nods. Vigorously. I continue, “As though you know exactly what you planned to say, and half-way there the words are gone.” A single decisive nod. Resignation? Or perhaps quiet triumph that this thought, at least, passed whole between us.

And then more Silence. We each sense it, but our positions with respect to it are quite different. I am but a guest in its presence today. Marguerite is being actively courted by the Silence. It is a holy thing to behold.

I venture to observe (with trepidation, but I do) that some years back (when her mind was clearer and the Silence not so immediate) she never spoke about her dead family members as “being in heaven.” She always referred to them as having “passed beyond the Veil,” or “gone to the Light.” As though already then Marguerite intuited that a hefty measure of humility—confident humility—was most appropriate in naming whatever it is that is Next.

Then I risked wondering aloud whether even “humble” words like veil and light shift in tenor on the threshold. Respectful … and tame at a safe distance, I suspect even these words seem to say both too much and too little for Marguerite right now.

I regard her unfinished sentences as witness to that truth. At the last. On the threshold itself. In this most acutely liminal existential moment, it’s how we meet the half left unsaid that finally matters. Because that half is just on the cusp of Next. It is the place where our silence acknowledges The Silence in the room.

I do my best (imperfectly, but still) to be a patient tender companion to Marguerite while I am a guest in this liminal space. And Marguerite does her best (imperfectly, but still) to meet this moment where her words falter with grace and reverence for the confusing mystery that presses in.

Who knows when the Silence will finally have its Say? When the Next will carry her Away. Who knows? Until then, I will relish these days so shaped by the half left unsaid.

***

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 at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.