The Cross on the Mountain Road

The road twisted like a ribbon unraveling through the hills, vanishing into fog and fir trees. Maggie drove it every Thursday morning to visit her father at the care home in Windy Ridge. It was a route she knew so well she could trace every bend with her eyes closed—but today, the fog clung thicker than usual, and her heart carried a weight it hadn’t borne before.

Her father had stopped recognizing her last week.

He had stared at her, blinking, polite and blank, then asked her to remind him where she lived. She’d smiled, masking the rip inside her, and told him again that she lived just an hour down the mountain. He’d nodded and asked, “Have we met before?”

Now, with rain threatening and her headlights cutting tunnels in the gray, Maggie found her mind circling that question. Have we met before? The man who had carried her on his shoulders, read the Psalms aloud by lantern light when the power went out, wept beside her mother’s grave—now didn’t know her name.

Halfway up the mountain, the fog thickened like wool over glass. Maggie slowed. On her right, a sharp drop vanished into cloud. On the left, the cliffs hunched close. She gripped the wheel. Then, suddenly, she saw it: a cross.

Not a signpost or a roadside memorial, but a tall, wooden cross nailed into the rock above a turnout. It looked old, almost forgotten, angled slightly to the side, weather-beaten. She hadn’t noticed it before, though she’d driven this road for years.

Something pulled at her.

She eased into the turnout and killed the engine. The silence was immediate, broken only by the ticking of her cooling car and the distant drip of rain off pine needles. She stepped out, boots crunching gravel, and walked to the base of the cross. No name. No plaque. Just wood, worn smooth by wind and time.

She stood still, hands in her coat pockets, breath visible in the cold. There was something about it—the starkness, the loneliness—that mirrored the ache inside her. The ache of being remembered by everyone except the one person who mattered most.

“Did You forget me too?” she whispered.

The question surprised her. She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But now that it was out, she couldn’t take it back. Her voice cracked in the stillness. She stared up at the wooden beam, expecting no reply.

Instead, she saw a bird—just a flash—dart from the cross’s top and vanish into the fog.

She laughed softly. “Nice timing.”

But she didn’t leave. She leaned against a mossy boulder nearby, arms wrapped around herself. Something about the place made it easier to sit in silence. To think. To let her heart speak.

She remembered a verse her father used to quote when she was little and afraid of storms: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you.” He would say it softly, pulling her close, always ending with, “He remembers us, Maggie. Always.”

But her father didn’t remember now.

She blinked fast. A tear slid down anyway. Then another. She didn’t wipe them away. She let them fall, as if each one carried a piece of the fear, the grief, the helplessness she’d tried to lock away.

“Where are You in this?” she asked. “Why does love fade like this?”

No answer came. But the fog seemed thinner now, and below the cross, she noticed something small: a stone, perfectly round, resting at the base like it had been placed there intentionally. Carved into it, barely legible, were the words: Still here.

She knelt.

Touched the stone with trembling fingers.

Who had written it? When? It didn’t matter. The words were what she needed. Not an answer. Not a fix. Just the truth: still here.

God hadn’t left. Even when memory did. Even when faces faded, names slipped, time unraveled—He remained.

Back in the car, Maggie sat for a long moment before starting the engine. She looked once more at the cross on the mountain road, its silhouette now clearer against the mist. Then she drove on, her hands lighter on the wheel.

When she reached the care home, her father was in the garden, wrapped in a blanket, watching the wind play with the leaves. She approached slowly, unsure what the moment would bring.

He turned to her and squinted. “There you are,” he said.

Her breath caught.

“You look just like your mother when she used to wait for me after work,” he added, smiling faintly. “I remember that.”

She knelt beside him, tears pricking again.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said. “I’m here.”

And behind her, in the quiet of her soul, another voice echoed gently—Still here.