Grief

It is we who are in the dark

now that you have taken your candle

and gone out alone.

It is we who are buried.

It is we who are alone.

I have Christian friends who insist that death is not an occasion for grief because nothing is lost in God.  I have atheist friends who insist the same thing but for the opposite reason, because no form is substantial in nature.

My answer to both is of two syllables, beginning and ending with fricatives.

Affection holds us together.  It values us for our gifts.  It gives us our place.  When it is gone, we are haunted not by how insubstantial it was, but by how much it gave us something worth having in a world of the tooth and the claw.

For a week the presence of my siblings and the busy, shuffling, muttering business of burying mom has kept the grief at bay. 

Now things are quiet.  

Now I feel her absence. 

She was the best conversationalist I ever knew, informed, witty, opinionated, gentle, perceptive.  I want to talk to her.  But she cannot answer.

She left notes for each of her children.  I’m sure she left one for dad.  Mine begins by telling me that she wanted me to know I was loved.  That wasn’t in doubt much: but I’ll never get tired of reading the long note she wrote when she knew she was dying and hid away for me to find when she was gone.  It’s the last time I’ll hear her real voice.

I had to give the eulogy at mom’s funeral (or “Celebration of her life” as they called it).  Though I’m the last person in my family that could be accused of being a good Christian, I was tasked with the portion called “Testimony of Christian Witness.”  

It was easy.  

This is the end of my tribute:

The abiding life of our mother was her affection; her love.  Long after the garden she planted right through that wall has decayed; and when nobody cares about the altar linens she washed and pressed; when the pews are replaced that you’re sitting in, which she polished by hand after Katrina flooded the church, when all the useful things are gone and buried, anybody who has been paying attention at all to her life will have passed on the affection that she gave.  And you’re lucky if you know, or can learn from her life, that affection changes everything.

Love has a habit of burning in the soul and spirit far more brightly than any works we do, or even any faith we have.  It outshines our intellects, outlasts our bodies, and passes from heart to heart like a flame that gives light to the world.  If you knew my mother, you knew her mother, and her father.   How strange a thing is love.

So abide these three, St. Paul wrote to urbane city-folk, Faith, hope, and love.  But take a lesson from the Judean hills, he continued.  Take a lesson from the Georgia pines.  The greatest of these is love. 

And as my grandparents even now open their arms to receive their sweet daughter, even as they turn to wait for us, love abides, the greatest virtue, not dead in a husk of flesh, but living and bright as ever, moving out to the world in you and in me.  So she has made us all more ready and more able to bear the breathtaking affection of God. 

I really am not sure what everybody heard in that last sentence.

What I meant though is that love of her sort is worth worshiping.  It’s worth serving. 

It’s worth aching over when it goes away.