Wendell Berry Helped Me See Grief Can Be a Gift

Excited and nervous, I pulled up to his house, grabbed the zucchini bread I had baked (I didn’t want to show up empty-handed), and walked up the stairs. I knocked on the door, hoping for a 30-minute conversation. We talked for hours.

There on Wendell’s porch, with his loyal dog Liz lying at our feet, we discussed politics and tobacco farming, fence building and the importance of community gathering places. We told stories and asked questions, and I described my planned marriage proposal, set for two days later in the loft of my family’s barn, to my now-wife Regan. That made him smile.

All the while, rain fell around us as it had for days. The soil became so saturated that, in the distance, a tree fell, its roots no longer a match for the weight of its leaves and branches. It crashed through the canopy and into the understory before its trunk lay still on the ground.

Wendell’s mind wandered to it and then returned to the porch. “Trees fall on days like this,” he said, looking past his barn into the woods along the river.

After that first visit, we exchanged more letters and occasionally talked on the phone. When I finished graduate school and Regan and I were married, we moved to Louisville, only about an hour southwest of the Berry home in Henry County, for my new job in sustainable agriculture. For the next year before moving back to Tennessee, we visited Wendell and his wife Tanya every few months.

On some of those visits, he asked me to join him out on the farm. We fed his sheep and searched for blue herons nesting along the creek, the “peace of wild things” playing out before us.

My relationship with Wendell was special, but that doesn’t mean it was unique. In the days since his death, I have spoken with mutual friends who also received his gifts of time and spirit. I have mourned over the phone with my brother Michael, who likewise counts Wendell as an inspiration and once had his own hours-long visit with Berry. Scrolling online, I have read moving tributes from strangers who, like me, reached out to this agrarian icon with a letter and were invited on a Port Royal pilgrimage.

For all of us whose lives have been shaped and animated by Wendell’s work, the grief is heavy. Yet in a strange way, I’m grateful for it, and I imagine others are, too. Feeling a loss so fully means that it was preceded by love and care. Painful as it is, grief is a gift.

People from all walks of life were drawn to Wendell’s words, in part because his convictions were so clear. As he liked to say, and as his daughter Mary is quick to affirm, Wendell stood for what he stood on, and he did so for decades with clarity and grace.

His writings on love have been most formative for me. This virtue is a throughline of his work, yet it shines most clearly in his essay “It All Turns on Affection.” Originally given as the 2012 Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government confers for intellectual achievement in the humanities, the essay elevates love, rooted in attention and imagination, as the primary motivator of good stewardship.

We need deep and enduring affection, especially over time and amid adversity, to sustain care for others and the earth, he said. The concept sounds simple, but for a culture at times obsessed with technocratic quick-fix solutions or the charged and fleeting emotions of our lives online, this kind of love is radical. It’s also difficult. But it offers a path forward through our troubles, in farming and life, if we are willing to follow it. “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope,” Wendell wrote. The essay remains the most important thing I have ever read.

Others are drawn to Wendell’s writings on limits. Our extractive economy conditions us to crave more—more money, more power, more technology, more growth. Yet he encouraged us to instead strive for “enough.” To do so isn’t settling for less. It’s embracing gratitude, finding purpose and recognizing our role within an ecosystem. Responsible limits nurture humility and reject hubris. Ideally, they uplift people who are struggling and tamp down those driven by greed. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell’s seminal 1977 book that celebrates its 50th anniversary next year, is about limits. Its wisdom has not yet been fully recognized.

Still others turn most frequently to Wendell’s thoughts on relationships and community, his subversion of conventional economics or his reverence for good food thoughtfully grown. Or to his appreciation of work, his praise of small places, or his depictions of heaven, home and the blurred line between them.

His individual writings on these themes and others, powerful though they are, matter less than how the ideas come together to form a cohesive vision. This vision is not, and never was, hollow. It was fully imagined. Alongside his wife Tanya, Wendell lived what he wrote. And because they did it, they believed that others could, too.

I have struggled to make sense of my thoughts and feelings about Wendell’s death. After I heard the news, I was stuck. Only in the weeks after have I started to shape what I’m feeling, and I am still coming up short.

Many have already paid tribute to Wendell with their words. Others are sure to follow. At some point, there will be a memorial service and celebration hosted by The Berry Center. A chorus is coming together, with different voices and tones and accents bringing a collective ode into the world. This song is beautiful, and it is needed, and it will, I hope, continue.

But what matters most isn’t what we say, no matter how pretty it sounds. It’s what we do. “There’s hope in seeing what we need to do, and in doing it,” Wendell wrote in his essay “Starting from Loss.” He was right.

As individuals, can we practice affection for each other and the places we call home? As communities, can we live within our limits? As a country, can we pursue policies that value good work, discourage exploitation and feed a more sustainable future? Wendell would say these public efforts cannot replace personal awareness and action, nor the character needed to cultivate lasting change. But they can offer much-needed structural support. 

These questions aren’t rhetorical. They deserve serious thought. When answering them, we should remember Wendell—not just recall but re-member—and keep his wisdom with us.

In his poem “The Old Elm Tree by the River,” Wendell found kinship in a hardwood.

“Willing to live and die, we stand here, timely and at home, neighborly as two men,” he wrote. “Our place is changing in us as we stand, and we hold up the weight that will bring us down. In us the land enacts its history. When we stood it was beneath us, and was the strength by which we held to it and stood, the daylight over it a mighty blessing we cannot bear for long.”

I shut my eyes and think back to our first visit. The rain is falling. The air is thick. The clouds are low. It’s warm and humid, but it isn’t hot. The road and the barn and the Kentucky River lie below us. Wendell is wearing khaki pants and a tucked-in shirt, and he’s smiling.

A giant’s roots give way. Leaves whoosh, branches break, and the physical embodiment of a life well-lived falls back to the ground from which it came. There it rests. Slowly, it sinks down, a “long shudder into humus” on a native hill, and brings up new life. The worms and beetles become brethren; they help it practice resurrection.

In the woods there is an opening. New roots take hold. Growth and grief happen at once. They shape each other.

Wendell’s lifework prepared us for this moment. With his words in mind, we too can root and rise.

Brooks LambMore by this author →

Brooks Lamb is the Director of Food Systems and Agriculture Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. He is the author of Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place, which takes inspiration from Wendell Berry’s work. He lives in Memphis.