Carrying Them Home

The casseroles stopped in the third week.

Not unkindly. Nobody decided anything. The first week the doorstep had food on it twice a day and the phone did not stop, and the second week it thinned, and by the third week there was one lasagne from the woman across the road, and then the doorstep was just a doorstep again. The cards came down off the mantelpiece in the fourth week because they had started to look untidy. By the second month, people had begun to greet him in the shop with a normal voice, which is a mercy and also a small closing door, and he had learned to give them the answer they could carry: getting there. One day at a time. You know.

He is not getting there. He is standing in a kitchen at half past six holding two mugs, because he took two out of the cupboard again, and there is nowhere to put the second one down that does not feel like a decision.

And here is the thing he cannot say to anybody, because it sounds mad and because he has run out of people to say things to. He does not actually want the ache to go. The ache is the last live wire. It is the one thing still connecting him to her, and every morning he wakes up slightly less raw than the morning before, and he grieves the loss of the rawness too. Feeling better feels like leaving her behind. So he holds on to it, and he tells the shop he is getting there.

I want to stop describing him, because you already stopped reading him a paragraph ago and started reading yourself.

You know what week it was when the world went back to normal and you did not. You know the double take at the second mug, the second toothbrush, the phone number you have not deleted and are not going to. And you know that private, unspeakable arithmetic: that putting them down feels like losing them a second time, and once was more than you could take.

Nobody in Scripture is told to hurry

I am not going to lift you yet. I want to stay down here for a minute, because for months people have arrived with the lift before they had done the looking, and it lands like a door closing.

So let me say what is actually true about this place.

It is heavier now than it was at the funeral. That is not a failure and it is not backwards, it is simply what happens: the first weeks are noise and arrangements and people, and grief does its real work later, in ordinary rooms, on ordinary Tuesdays, after everyone has gone back to their lives. The day is further behind now and the help is further away, both at the same time.

The asking exhausts you. Nobody asking is worse. Both. At once.

There is a running list in your head of things you would tell them, and no one to tell.

And somewhere along the way it became easier to perform being all right, competently, for people who love you, because their relief is easier to be around than their worry.

I am not going to try to fix any of that. Some of it is not a problem to be solved. Some of it is love with nowhere to put itself, and that is not a malfunction. That is what love does when the person it was for is not in the room. And you are not on your own in that room either, whatever half past six looks like. The Spirit is called the Comforter, and the comforting has never had anything to do with tidying a person up.

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.1 Thessalonians 4:13

Look at what that verse actually permits, because it is almost always quoted as though it said something else.

It does not say do not sorrow. It says do not sorrow as those who have no hope. Paul is not taking the grief away from them. He is refusing to let despair be the whole of it. Which means, plainly, that grief with hope is still grief. It still cries in the car. It still cannot get through a certain song. It is not a lesser or more spiritual thing, and it does not have a schedule. So hear this and let it stay: you are permitted. 1 Thessalonians 4:13 gives you the sorrow and takes only the despair. The Spirit has never once stood over a grieving person with a stopwatch.

And if you want to know what God thinks of tears at a graveside, there is a scene where He shows you directly.

Jesus came to Bethany four days after Lazarus died. He knew exactly what He was about to do. He had said so out loud, in advance, to the disciples and to Martha. And when He came to the tomb and saw Mary weeping and the others weeping with her, He groaned in His spirit, and He was troubled, and He wept.

He wept anyway.

Sit with that. His tears were not ignorance of the ending. He knew the ending, and He cried at the tomb regardless, because death is an outrage and He has never once pretended otherwise. God does not stand at a distance from your kitchen at half past six with a theological correction. He came into the death, and He wept in it, and He is not embarrassed by you. John 11:35 is two words long, written down and kept, and the Spirit has never read a person's tears as a lapse. You are not too much for that kitchen at half past six with two mugs in your hands.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Near. Not on the way. Not after you improve. Near, now, in the specific room you are in. Psalm 34:18 does not say He arrives once you are better. He is already there, and that nearness is the Spirit's doing, which is why it does not wait for you to be further along.