In the autumn that Alzheimer’s disease sent my mother wandering at nights, I began to study the medieval poem The Pearl. This came to me by chance. I had traveled to North Carolina to see firsthand how my father and brother were managing. My mother’s sundowning – that period at the end of the day when dementia sufferers become anxious, hallucinate, and wander – had spilled over into the night and early morning hours. This had become every night and every early morning, such that my octogenarian father never slept. Despite the strain, he could not yet let go of being her primary caregiver. We wavered on a decision about next steps. I flew back to New York. On a walk to clear my mind, I stopped into Half Moon Books and bought a used copy of Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann’s translation of that singularly strange, beautiful work.

In the poem, a merchant’s spotless pearl falls to the earth and is lost in the grass, leaving him with a wounded heart. The speaker, usually referred to as the merchant or jeweler, laments that he has lost an incomparable pearl. Here are his opening words:

Through grass to earth it went from me!
I pined away, sore-wounded by the love-dominion
Of that pearl of mine without a spot.

Across the history of the poem’s reception, this pearl has been understood to be a child, a lover, virtue, the soul, or Christ. Yet any attempt to reduce the pearl to allegory fails, which may well have been the poet’s intent. Still, we’re clearly in a world of Christian allegory: spotless maidens, falls from grace, paradise lost. Soon the merchant invokes death and resurrection – the pearl is like “dead grain” that must overwinter in the earth before it returns as grass in the spring. But an allegorical reading doesn’t adequately account for the pearl or the wound it left, even if we can imagine Christians being as overwhelmed by regret for their sin as the merchant appears to be.

It seems that any book we read or music we listen to during times of trial speaks directly to our own heartache and exhaustion. I couldn’t help but see my father’s experience in The Pearl. His experience is, in the end, one that most everyone will share: the longing, guilt, hope, and helplessness of grief, which is itself a manifestation of love. To study The Pearl is to meditate on grief and love.

Before reading The Pearl, I went back to its primary source, the parable of the pearl of great price in the Gospel of Matthew – one of Jesus’ shortest parables. I was raised an evangelical Christian, though I’m not one any longer. So I’ve read the Gospels many times, both as a believer and critically, and yet I’m now certain that I misunderstood this parable for most of my life. Here it is in full:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. (Matt. 13:45–46)

I start with the King James Version for the poetry of it, but note that the Revised Standard Version translates “price” as “value,” trading alliterative beauty for accuracy of meaning. An object’s price, after all, can be greater than its value, because people are greedy, always seeking to maximize profits. In contrast, value tends to be agreed upon communally and conferred by the culture. In the parable, the merchant determines that a pearl he has found is so valuable that he must sell all he has to pay for it. It’s irrational and excessive, and as a teacher, Jesus might have expected at least one of his disciples to question this. Sell everything for it? That’s ridiculous. Like many of Jesus’ lessons, the parable does not stand to reason, because this kingdom has a value beyond reason. We know of other such pearls: family, love, health, joy. Jesus considered the kingdom of heaven more valuable than these, imploring his disciples to leave their jobs and even their families if they stood in the way (Luke 14:26). An old bluegrass chestnut engages in a similar calculation. “What would you give,” Bill Monroe intones with a high lonesome sound, “in exchange for your soul?” The parable replies, in effect, that if the soul longs for the kingdom of heaven, everything of this world must be given over for it.

The parable is usually called “The Pearl of Great Price,” and I’ve been treating it as though focusing on the pearl will bring us to an understanding of its value. But the parable requires us to pay as much attention to the merchant as to the pearl, because we need to inhabit the frame of mind of one who would make such an exchange. After all, the analogy likens the kingdom not to the pearl but to a merchant seeking pearls and what follows when he finds an invaluable one. Notice that the merchant is alone; whether others benefit from his success is not mentioned. This is about an individual’s experience.

For the merchant, the “kingdom of heaven” is the experience of coming into possession of the pearl by an extraordinary, extravagant act. His experience is all of this: the search, the wait, the discovery, the thrill. It is all the losses as well as the invaluable gain. At one level, this experience is a transaction: there is an exchange, a selling and buying, between a merchant and, presumably, the unnamed owner of the pearl. But the unnamed owner is God, who does not need the merchant’s stuff. Throughout the Bible, God seeks relationship. If the merchant bought the pearl and ran off with it – presumably not to his house, which he has just sold – there’s no relationship, only loss.

The prevailing interpretation of the parable is expressed in Monroe’s song: the merchant gave his soul to God so that he could enter the kingdom of heaven. That’s how I understood it from my evangelical days. Setting aside that reading, we might begin to see something more profound: What experience is worth all that you have and are? That experience is what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven.

When my mother first showed signs of dementia, my parents must have had no illusions about what lay ahead. Mom’s mother and grandmother had lived with the condition for the final decade of their lives, and my mother and her sister had taken care of them. As in their cases, my brother and I noticed the notes stuck around the house, the slowed pace of dinner preparation, the loss of interest in the newspaper and favorite TV shows. Still, to ask about Mom’s condition seemed an invasion of privacy. Then came the pandemic. My parents had good reason to isolate themselves, not least because my father’s cancer rendered him immunocompromised. Isolation made it difficult for us to gauge my mother’s status, but it also deepened my father’s commitment to being her sole caregiver. After their doors reopened, and her losses were no longer possible to dismiss as age or fatigue, they closed ranks. My father signaled that when they needed help, he would let us know.

My father always admired and adored my mother. She was a kindergarten teacher’s assistant at the local public school for over thirty years. In the evening, after my father arrived home from the factory where he worked, he would often help her draw, cut, and paste, materials for her classroom. On Saturdays, he helped her father, a farmer, and on Sundays, we sat around the TV at my grandfather’s house while he smoked and told stories about the cast of preachers, drunks, crack shots, and hotheads that made up our family tree. Being part of my mother’s family was, for my father, second in importance only to being my mother’s man. He was devoted to her happiness, never more so than as her mental health declined. When the person she had always been would resurface – sometimes for hours during the disease’s middle stages – he would sit on the porch with her with renewed spirit and contentment. This was the kingdom of heaven: just sitting, noticing the birds at the feeder, and repeating whatever story of the distant past she was currently preoccupied with. If selling all of their possessions could have purchased a dispensation to remain in that state until they passed away, he would have paid the price without a moment’s hesitation.

We cannot have the person without the body. Alzheimer’s inexorably alters the person and leaves us the body to recognize, even as the mind stops recognizing us. My mother’s case was, in my estimation, especially pernicious because she had no physical ailments. Her shape, expressions, mannerisms, and voice were not much different at seventy-seven than they were at twenty-seven. But the person who had been defined by an unremitting optimism and at-times exasperating selflessness; who had been the caregiver of her grandmother, mother, and father through terrible illnesses; who had raised her brothers and sister, and my brother and me, as if it were the simplest and greatest pleasure conceivable, even when we were variously wayward, confrontational, and indifferent; who could tease and cajole my father into softening his position and changing his mind; who had become fixated on his cancer and managed it until she could no longer keep track of his appointments and medicines – that person had become a shadow, and that body stormed out the door daily and wandered in the graveyard at nights in search of her parents. My father would hobble after her, afraid of losing her physically as well as mentally, his own body breaking down under the strain.

In the parable, the merchant searches for a pearl that he believes exists but has never encountered. The medieval poem The Pearl reorients the story: the merchant seeks to recover a priceless pearl that he has lost. Here again are the merchant’s opening words, this time in J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation:

Through grass to the ground from me it shot;
I pine now oppressed by love-wound drear
For that pearl, mine own, without a spot.

Only about five hundred lines into the poem – after the merchant has fallen asleep in the garden and begun to dream of a young maiden, whom he recognizes and adores, covered in pearls – do we learn that this pearl “livedst not two years in our land,” dying before she could pray the Our Father or recite the Apostle’s Creed (Hillman, 834–6). Many readers have homed in on these lines and argued that the merchant grieves the death of his daughter. According to this reading, The Pearl is an elegy, an attempt at consolation through Christian apologetics. In the merchant’s vision, the young maiden recalls the biblical parable and implores her father to “renounce the foolish world / And purchase thy pearl spotless” (743–4). That is, to enter the kingdom of heaven – and to regain his lost daughter – he must shed all attachment to this world, including his memories and grief. In a medieval Christian framework, his overwhelming grief implies an attachment to the material world and a lack of faith in God’s grace, since his innocent child, in death, is taken into the actual kingdom of heaven, a paradise beyond the mortal world. It’s a harsh lesson, especially when given by a vision of the dead child herself. Your feelings are an impediment, she implies, and even a slight to the one whom you grieve.

The merchant’s entire dialogue with Pearl has been carried out across a river that flows between them. When the merchant seeks reassurance that she is secure where she dwells, Pearl gives him a vision of the kingdom. Experiencing the vision makes his desire for reunion greater:

Delight drove into me through eye and ear,
my man’s mind melting to madness.
When I saw my free one, I would be there,
beyond the water where she was set.
(Beal, 1153–6)

He leaps into the river, determined to swim across, only to be startled awake from his dream and realize his error. To be with his Pearl, the merchant would have to die. He knows this, and attempting to cross the river is tantamount to suicide. What price is he willing to pay to reclaim his Pearl? Life and soul. To admire the merchant’s resolve is to misread the doctrine of the poem, whose Prince is displeased and wakes him. But one does sense the ache that drives the poem – and, perhaps, the poet. If a child has incalculable value, a parent’s life must be the “all” that would be given for it. And yet the parent cannot possess the child, not for all their life and love, none of which can fully shield the child, let alone resurrect her from premature death. Parenthood requires a “love-wound drear.” There is no escape from that suffering in this life, and the promise of the next life is inadequate recompense.

The scholar and translator Jane Beal has convincingly argued that Pearl is not a child but the merchant’s lover. Beal points out that “lived only two years in our land” need not suggest death, only transience. If we agree that the pearl is a lover, the language of medieval courtly romance that the merchant so often uses makes more sense, and the intensity of his desire is easier to understand.

As I watched my father grieve, The Pearl made sense to me as a synthesis of these two readings – as an elegy to a lover. It also further humanized the biblical parable for me. What is the kingdom of heaven if not love fully embodied in total devotion? The Incarnation – God becoming man and dwelling among us – is the ultimate example of such love. When the merchant in The Pearl leaps into the river, when the parable’s merchant sells all he owns, they are carrying out devotion at a level modeled by their Creator. That suffering will continue is no surprise. The promise of the kingdom does not mean we won’t have to face death, as Jesus’ example makes abundantly clear.

Many Christians find solace in the belief that paradise will be regained after death. But the pearl of great price is as much about this life as any afterlife; it is about present fulfillment as well as hope. “The verse reads ‘the kingdom of god is at hand,’” a Sufi mystic once said to me, “as in right here and now. Touch it.” For faith to help us at the worst of times, it cannot always be oriented to future payoff. Because Alzheimer’s destroys memory, the caregiver is robbed of a pearl that lifetime partners have shared. Reminiscing, even with the aid of photos, becomes futile. Maybe this is all the more reason to gaze off to some hoped-for future shore. But illness forces us to live in the present and to find something of value at hand.

“I made a vow before God to take care of her,” my father insisted, “until I’m in my grave or she is.” This was in response to my suggestion that it might be time for nursing care. It was after our fourth trip driving my mother “home” – the place she would wake up in her bed demanding to be taken to.

How to describe these nightly rituals? My mother is in her blue flannel pajamas spotted with snowflakes. She carries a stack of blankets and flannel shirts for herself and my father, because there is a chill in the late autumn. She is urgent; speed is important; her eyes are wide. My father, in his T-shirt and red flannel bottoms, walks as quickly as his arthritic limbs allow. He sighs and apologizes to me, but I hush him and offer to drive. To go home, we will pull out of the driveway and, following my mother’s directions, drive around the block to the right until we return to the same house. She will read the mailbox number and declare that we have finally made it home.

There is another version. Before sunrise, she is dressed for church. She clutches her purse and Bible. We must get to sunrise service because it is Easter morning. My father points out that it is October, and sighing, she declares him mistaken. As we drive around the block, he repeats this, and my mother says that since he doesn’t want to go, we should take her to her parents’ house. She will go with them instead. My father reminds her that they’ve passed away. “Fine, just take me home,” she snaps.

Back in the kitchen, I offer to make coffee. My mother again worries that we’ll miss the sunrise service. I point to a big digital calendar my brother has provided to help in these situations.

“Well, look at that,” I say, “Today is Saturday, October 19.”

“I guess that calendar is wrong,” she replies. Then the sun begins to rise. She is smitten with the colors, and her attention turns to ensuring that we notice how beautiful it is.

That person, the one who marvels at sunrises, is the one my father insists is still there often enough that he can manage the other. She is there again in the evening when we see the comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). My brother and I go outside at dusk to look for it. Because he’s found it before, he knows we should triangulate Venus and Arcturus. I keep seeing no comet. I’ve always had less patience than my brother, and am ready to throw in the towel when he finds it again. The tail is prominent but could be mistaken for a cloud or mist. He brings our parents outside, and for a few moments, everyone is captivated. My mother goes on and on about the stars, counting them with the excitement of a child.

“Would you look at that!” she declares. “My word, I can’t get over how many there are.”

What wouldn’t we give to freeze that moment? The kingdom of heaven is marveling at the stars with your family on a cool evening.

“It’s something, all right,” my father agrees, and holds her hand.

Versions of The Pearl cited in this essay include The Pearl: Mediaeval Text with a Literal Translation and Interpretation, trans. Sister Mary Vincent Hillmann (University of Notre Dame Press, 1967); Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, trans. J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); and Pearl: Text and Translation, trans. Jane Beal (Broadview Press, 2020).