The Empty Half of the Bed

She still sleeps on her side.

Right at the edge of it, the way she has slept for thirty one years, with the whole rest of the mattress lying flat and cold and undisturbed beside her. In the morning she makes the bed and there is nothing to make on that side. The pillow is exactly as she left it. She straightens it anyway, because a made bed is a thing a person does, and she has learned that the day goes better if she does two or three things a person does before she lets herself think.

The house is very loud now. That is the part nobody warns you about. Silence is not the absence of noise, it is a noise of its own, and it has a volume, and it gets louder around half past four in the afternoon and stays that way until she gives up and puts the television on for the sound of a voice.

It has been fourteen months. The cards came, and the casseroles came, and the phone rang for about six weeks, and then the world did the thing the world always does, which is to go back to its own evenings. She does not blame them. Everybody has their own life and their own weather. But she has noticed that people ask about her differently now. They ask brightly. They ask in a way that has an answer already loaded into it, and so she gives them the answer they have loaded, and says she is doing all right, and they look relieved, and it costs her something every single time.

Two friends came on a Thursday, early on. They sat in the front room until it got dark and nobody turned a light on, and they did not say one useful thing all evening, and she has thought about that night a hundred times since. It is the kindest thing anyone did.

And you are the one who has read this far, which means you know about the side of the bed, or the chair nobody sits in, or the second toothbrush you have not been able to move. Someone told you it would ease by now. It has not, or it has, unpredictably, and then it comes back at full strength on an ordinary Tuesday because of a song in a shop.

I am not going to tidy this

I want to be very careful with you, because this is the part of the internet where people get hurt.

I am not going to tell you that this is part of a plan you would understand if you could see it properly. I am not going to hand you a silver lining or a reason. I am not going to suggest, in any wording however gentle, that your grief is a stage you should have moved through by now. And I am not going to say the word healed about a death, because a death is not an illness and there is nothing about this to cure, and I have watched that word do real damage in rooms exactly like the one you are sitting in.

Here is what is true, and I will say it plainly, because Isaiah 61:3 was written down for people still sitting in the ash, and His Spirit is the reason it can be said in a house at half past four without turning into a slogan.

They are gone, and it is unbearable, and you are bearing it, and the fact that you have got up and eaten something and answered an email today is not evidence that it is getting better. It is evidence that you are extraordinary, and that nobody has noticed.

And the specific cruelty of your particular loss is the night. Daytime has furniture in it. There are tasks, and people, and reasons to be upright. Night has none of that. Night has a bed with a half of it that is still empty, and the whole day catches up with you in the last twenty minutes before sleep, and there is nobody to say the small nothing you would have said to them, the observation about the day that was never worth saying to anyone else and was the entire fabric of your life together. That is the loss underneath the loss. Not the big absence. The ten thousand small ones.

And I will say one more hard thing, because you have been carrying it silently and it is not yours. Somewhere in the middle of all this you started keeping score of yourself. Whether you cried in the right places. Whether you were strong enough at the service and then too weak in a car park in October. Whether the fact that you laughed at something in March means you have started to forget. You have been marking your own grief like an examination paper. Nobody is marking it. There is no correct way to survive this, and every single thing you have done since has been an act of endurance rather than a mistake. Scripture calls you one who mourns in Zion and appoints something toward you there, in the ash, with no examination attached, and the Holy Spirit has never once walked into a room like yours carrying a red pen.

Now let me show you something in the verse this message stands on, because most people quote the pretty half and drop the rest.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.Isaiah 61:3

Look at how much of that sentence is made of dark words. Mourn. Ashes. Mourning. Heaviness. God wrote the grief into his own promise, at length, without flinching and without hurrying past it. He did not describe a people who had recovered. He described people in ash, and he did not ask them to be anywhere other than exactly where they were.

And read the verb. Beauty for ashes. An exchange, and an exchange is not an erasure. Nobody comes and sweeps the ashes out of the room and tells you the fire never happened. The ashes are received. They are taken seriously enough to be given something in return for, and what is given does not cancel what was lost. It is set beside it.

There is no timetable in that verse. Not one. It says appoint, which is the language of something deliberately arranged, someone setting an intention toward mourners on purpose. Your grief is not being tolerated by heaven while it waits for you to finish. It is being attended.

And there is one more thing, and it is the one I most want to put in your hands tonight.

When Jesus came to the grave of his friend, he already knew what he was about to do. He was minutes away from calling that man out of the tomb by name. Every reason to be composed. And the shortest verse in the whole Bible says he wept. He stood in the middle of other people's grief, with full knowledge of how the day was going to end, and he cried, because the grief itself was worth crying about.

He did not correct the sisters. He did not tell them to lift their eyes. He did not say a single one of the things people have been saying to you in supermarkets for fourteen months. He wept with them first.

So if you have wondered whether God is impatient with how long this is taking, look at that grave. He is not standing at the door of your grief tapping the frame. He is inside it, sitting down, and he is not in a hurry, and he is not leaving when it gets dark. That is not a mood I am guessing at. John 11:35 put it in writing in two words, and His Spirit is what carries those two words out of a graveyard and into a front room where the television is on for the sound of a voice.