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I spoke with a longtime friend yesterday – a grown man, forty-something, never sheltered, long acquainted with death and suffering, life and hard work, and also kind, intelligent, and spiritually pulled together. He was distraught. His mom had died.
1. Death is not natural. People who say “death is natural” are full of baloney. It is normal, in that it happens to most everybody. But it isn’t natural. We aren’t made for death. We are made for eternal life. Every death is an insult to our very nature. A tearing apart of something that was never meant to be torn.
2. We never love as well as we would like. It impossible. There are too many people to love, and we are so limited by time and space and our own human weakness. It is physically impossible to call enough, to hug enough, to help enough, to smile enough — it cannot be done. When someone we love dies, it will nearly always come at a time when we wish we could have done more.
3. The rupture of death leaves raw, open ends. We humans are created to live in time. Living in time means change and growth and processes that start now and end later. Death interrupts. We were about to call, going to visit, starting to forgive, just remembering the birthday we forgot . . . when death leaps in and steals the chance to finish the work we had started, however imperfectly, however incompletely. It is impossible, because it is contrary to our very nature as creatures living in time, to live each day, each minute, with every work finished, every relationship complete.
4. Agonizing over the work left undone is a shoddy plot device. In cheap fiction, lazy writers build drama around the “if-only’s”, as if there were some merit in pretending to have super-human powers, and then flagellating yourself for failing to use them. Yes, examine your conscience. Yes, repent. Yes, move forward. Yes, start anew. But don’t build a shrine to your own imperfection.
5. You can miss the sinner without missing the sin. Humans — loveable, loved, wonderfully complex, maddenly flawed — can be so, so, obnoxious. And sometimes much worse. It is possible, normal, to grieve the loss of a parent or close kinsman who was a brutal, oppressive tyrant. But for many of us, by the grace of God, the one we love was only very annoying, and not all the time. We would defend to the death the honor of someone who, in life, we studiously avoided at crucial moments.
It is okay to both weep openly for the loss of a relative, and also be relieved you can now post your vacation pictures on Facebook without being asked, “Why didn’t you invite me? And what’s wrong with Dayton for a family vacation? Pick up the phone!”
6. Distance changes grief. When you are the one bearing the exhausting physical and emotional work of caring for, or overseeing the care of, the dying person, day after never ending day, death is different. When you are immersed in the horrifying physical agony of your loved one’s never ending suffering, death is different. It comes as a release. At least she can be happy now. At least he is free of his affliction.
When you are far away, or when death comes too soon and too suddenly, you do not love less. But you grieve differently. You are not the one crushed in the winepress, begging for mercy however terrible. You are the one who is hungry for more of the life you remember, the part of life that still feels possible, because you have not been flooded with misery until all hope has been washed from your imagination.
These are two sides of the same hope. When life offers nothing, we finally set our sights on eternal life. When we find ourselves hating the taunt of eternal life, because we still have some shred of joy here on earth? It is a testament to reality. We are not made for death and separation. We are not meant to have to imagine a world of happiness, we are meant to live in it.
7. Jesus wept. If anyone was certain of Heaven, Jesus was. If anyone, on the day Lazarus died, had reason to hope, it was our Lord. He held in his hands the power to raise Lazarus to earthly life and to eternal life, and he knew he would do both. It is not a mark of insufficient faith if we mourn the death of someone we love. It is not short-sightedness, or an unhealthy attachment to earthly pleasure, if we are troubled at the end of life on earth. There is no special merit in putting on a big smile and singing happy-clappy songs, as if the mark of true faith were an inability to feel pain. Do we hope? Yes. Is joy inadmissible in the face of death? By no means.
To be a carpenter is one way to live out the calling to be fully human in our work. Making sure there’s enough wine for the wedding is one way to be fully human in our concern for others. They are not the only ways. But they are important models. Left to our own flights of fancy, we might decide building houses or throwing parties was somehow too earthly to be a spiritual work. We might admire the way this great theologian or that austere hermit set aside all earthly concerns and seemed to live only for heaven, and suspect that those whose lives were more immersed in earthly realities are the second-rate Christians. As if to be fully human is to fail to notice the very earth on which humans were placed from the beginning.
Not so, says He who gave us this world. I made it good. Every rip, every flaw, every sorrow that mars a once-perfect world? Our Lord grieves. We are not alone.
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