Next Week, and Nobody Else Has Noticed

The receipt comes out of the machine curling, the way they do, and he takes it because taking it is faster than deciding not to.

Tuesday evening. The self checkout at the end, the one nobody uses because the scanner is temperamental. Six things in the bag. Bread, eggs, a bag of salad he will not eat, washing up liquid, and the oat milk, because his hand went to it the way his hand still goes to it, and he was two aisles further on before he remembered she was the only one who drank it, and he did not take it back.

He looks at the receipt on the way to the door. Not at the total. At the date printed along the top.

The thirteenth.

And the sum happens before he can get in front of it, the way it always does now, quick and unasked, like a bruise finding a doorframe.

Nine days.

He gets to the car and puts the bags on the passenger seat and does not start the engine. The car park lights are on even though it is not properly dark. A trolley goes past on its own for a few feet and stops. Somebody laughs at the recycling point.

This afternoon a colleague leaned on the edge of his desk and asked whether he had much on at the weekend, and he said not much, and she said lucky you, and they both laughed, and he went and got a coffee he did not want.

The first year, everybody had the date. There were messages. Somebody sent flowers to the house, which he did not know what to do with and put on the windowsill until they went over. Last year there were three: her sister, one friend, and a woman from church whose own husband had died the year before and who therefore did not need reminding.

This year, so far, nobody.

And it is not that they stopped caring. He knows they did not. It is that the calendar of the world got up and carried on walking, which is what calendars do, and his did not, and there is now a date coming towards him at the pace of a normal week that will be, for everyone else in his life, an ordinary Thursday.

He sits with the receipt in his hand, and under the ache there is a second, meaner one that he would never say out loud: he wants somebody to ask. He wants it badly. And wanting it feels like begging, so he has not told a living soul that next Thursday is anything at all.

You know the date at the top of the receipt.

Yours might be a birthday that is still a birthday and has nowhere to go. It might be the morning of the phone call, or the day of the funeral, or the last ordinary Saturday before everything, which is a date only you have and which no one has ever asked you about. And you know the run up more than the day itself. The way the week before goes strange. The way your body starts before your mind does.

He starts the car eventually and drives home, and it is still next Thursday, and he still has not said it to anybody.

Your body keeps a calendar nobody else has

I am not going to try to make next week smaller. It is not smaller. And I am not going to hand you a reason, because I do not have one, and the people who offer you one are guessing out loud at your expense.

So let me just say what is true, and stay in it a minute, and not rush.

The later ones are frequently the worst, and almost nobody warns you about that. The first anniversary comes with scaffolding. People are still afraid for you. There are messages and cards and someone rings on the night before. By the third, or the fifth, or the ninth, the scaffolding is gone and the building is still standing there with the same hole in it, and now the expectation on you is to be somebody who has come through something.

And there is the loneliness of being the only one who knows what week it is. That is its own separate grief, sitting on top of the first one. You are not only missing her. You are missing her privately, in a world that has quietly agreed the mourning period is over, and you have started managing other people's comfort about it, which is an unbelievable thing to ask of a person who is the one actually bereaved. Nobody at your work knows what week this is; the Spirit of God has known since the hour it happened, and a whole written book of Scripture is given over to grief nobody else was marking.

I will say one more, and then I will stop, because you did not come here to be catalogued. You want to be asked, and wanting that makes you feel pathetic. It does not make you pathetic. It makes you a human being who lost someone and would like the world to acknowledge that they existed.

Now listen to what God chose to keep.

My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me.Lamentations 3:20

Think about what that verse is doing in the Bible at all.

There is an entire book in Scripture that is nothing but grief. Not grief resolved. Not grief with the lesson attached. Five poems of a man walking around a ruined city saying the same unbearable things in slightly different orders, and God kept it, and put it in the middle of the book He gave to everybody, and did not tidy it.

Read the line again. My soul continually remembers. Continually. He is not being told to stop. He is not rebuked for circling. The bowing down is described, in Scripture, in the first person, without one word of correction attached to it.

So whatever you have been told about moving on, it did not come from here.

Your remembering is not a failure. It is love that has nowhere to put itself. It has to go somewhere, and so it goes into a date, and into the aisle where the oat milk is, and into a week that starts feeling strange before you have consciously counted anything. That is not a fault line in you. It is the exact thing Lamentations 3:20 was written down to describe, and His Spirit keeps it alight in you rather than asking you to put it out.

And if you want to know what God thinks of tears at a grave, He stood at one. Jesus came to Lazarus's tomb knowing exactly what He was about to do, four minutes from the loudest moment of His ministry, and He wept first. He did not weep because He lacked information. He wept because someone He loved was dead and the people He loved were crying, and He is not a God who requires you to skip that part.

Nobody has ever been closer to a resurrection than He was in that moment, and He still cried.