Grieving Someone Who Is Still Here

Twenty to three on a Tuesday, and the front room has that flat afternoon light that makes everything look like it is waiting.

He has gone to sleep in the chair again. Head back, mouth slightly open, the blue blanket over his knees that he pretends he does not need and pulls up anyway. The television is on with the sound down. On the table beside him is a plate with half a digestive biscuit on it, and beside that, her cup, which she has not drunk from and which has now gone the temperature of the room.

Eleven weeks ago they sat in an office with a box of tissues already on the desk, which is how you know before anyone says anything. She remembers the exact pattern of the carpet. She remembers that she said thank you to the consultant, twice, which she has thought about since with a kind of bewilderment.

And she has been crying ever since about a man who is three feet away from her.

That is the part nobody warned her about. Last Thursday she stood in a supermarket car park with the boot open and shopping in it and sobbed for eleven minutes about her father, and then drove to his house and let herself in and he called out from the front room asking whether she wanted a biscuit with her tea. He is not gone. He is right there. He is arguing about the immersion heater and complaining about the neighbor's hedge and telling the same story about the ferry, and she is already missing him so much it takes the wind out of her on the stairs.

She has not told anyone this. How could she. It sounds like giving up on him. It sounds disloyal, as though some part of her has already filed him away, and she loves him, and she would take his place in that chair this afternoon if anyone offered.

He shifts in his sleep. The blanket slides off one knee. She leans forward and puts it back without waking him, and sits down again, and the clock in the hall does what clocks do.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you have your own Tuesday afternoon. You have a room with someone in it who is still here, and you are already in mourning, and you cannot say that sentence out loud to a single person in your family. You have cried in a car park. You have been asked how they are doing and answered brightly, and then sat in the driver's seat afterwards with your hands in your lap.

You are grieving someone who is asking whether you want a biscuit.

This is grief, and it began the day they told you

I am not going to lift you out of this. I want to say that plainly at the start, because a great many kind people have tried to lift you in the last eleven weeks and every one of them has left you lonelier than they found you.

So let it be named properly first.

What you are carrying is grief. Actual grief, not a rehearsal for it, not worry, not stress, not being dramatic. It arrived in an office with a box of tissues on the desk and it has been in the house ever since. Something was taken from you that day. Not the person. The future. The assumed years, the ordinary unthinking expectation that they would be at the thing in September, that there would be more Christmases, that you could put off the conversation you keep not having. All of that went in a single sentence, and nobody sent a card, because in everyone else's arithmetic nothing has happened yet.

And it is a strange, cruel kind of grief, because it has no permission. When someone dies, the world makes room. People bring food. There is a day, and a service, and afterwards there is a word for what you are. You have none of that. You are expected to be positive and available and organized, to manage appointments and be cheerful in the room, and to do all of it while carrying a loss that has not been allowed to exist yet. Nobody sent a card. But the word carries a whole book of laments for exactly this, and the Holy Spirit does not wait for the world's permission before He grieves in that front room alongside you.

Let me take one thing off you, because I think it is the heaviest.

Grieving them is not betraying them. It is not giving up on them. It is not a failure of hope or a lack of faith, and it is certainly not you quietly deciding how this ends. It is what love does when love is told that something is coming for the person it loves. You are not mourning them instead of loving them. You are mourning them because you love them, and the two are the same movement in you, and God is not confused by it even for a second. That is written, and it is not my kindness talking. His Spirit carried those eleven minutes in a supermarket car park straight to the Father, and not one of them was disloyal.

I am not going to tell you what happens next. I do not know. Nobody reading a page to you knows, and anyone who speaks with certainty about your father's next twelve months is trading in something that was never theirs to sell. What I can put in your hands is not a forecast. It is a sentence written by a man who knew this country well, and the Holy Spirit has kept it in the world for three thousand years for afternoons exactly like this one.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Now look at something in that psalm that is easy to walk past, and it is the whole reason I brought you here.

Read the verses before it. He makes me lie down. He leads me. He restores my soul. He guides me. Every one of them is about God. He, He, He. David is describing the Shepherd to whoever is listening, the way you would describe someone you trust to a friend across a table.

And then he steps into the valley, and the grammar changes.

For you are with me. Not He. You. From that line onward the psalm is no longer a description of God. It is a conversation with Him. In the darkest verse of the most quoted poem in human history, the man stops talking about God and starts talking to Him.

I want you to notice what that means, because it is not decoration. The nearness is not stated. It is demonstrated, by the fact that the address changes. The valley is precisely the place where God stopped being a subject and became a presence in the room. That change of grammar is written into the psalm on purpose. His Spirit is what makes it happen again, in your front room, at twenty to three on a Tuesday.

And notice what David does not say. He does not say the valley turns out to be shorter than it looked. He does not say the shadow lifts. He does not offer a single word about the outcome. He says one thing only, and he says it in the second person: you are with me.

That is what is actually available to you at twenty to three on a Tuesday. Not an answer. Not a promise about the ferry story or September or Christmas. The One who is with you in the front room, while the blanket slides off a knee and the clock in the hall carries on.