The Last Thing You Said

Gray afternoon, about four, and everyone else went back to the cars twenty minutes ago.

The flowers from the day are still there. The cellophane has gone dull and there is water sitting in the bottom of the wrapping, and the chrysanthemums at the edge have turned that brown that flowers turn. Somebody's card has come loose and is face down in the grass.

He has his car keys in his hand. He has had them in his hand since he got out of the car, which was a while ago now, and the metal has gone warm.

He is not praying. He has tried and it will not come. What he is doing, and he has been doing it since a Tuesday three weeks ago, is playing a forty-second recording that exists nowhere except in his own head.

It goes like this. He is in a supermarket car park. He has a trolley half in and half out of the boot and the phone wedged under his chin, and she is telling him something about a woman at the church who has had a fall, and he is not listening, he is watching a van waiting for his space. And he says, Mum, I have got to go, the freezer stuff is going to defrost. And she says something he does not catch. And he says, I will ring you Sunday, all right? Love you. Bye.

Forty seconds. He did not ring on Sunday. He meant to. He absolutely meant to, and he can even remember the moment on Sunday afternoon when he thought of it and thought, later.

Everybody at the service said lovely things. Somebody said, at least she did not suffer. And he stood there in a borrowed tie and nodded, and the whole time there was a sentence going round in him like a wasp in a jar, which was: the last thing she heard from me was about frozen peas.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you have your forty seconds. Maybe it was a snapped answer in a hospital corridor when you had not slept. Maybe it was a door closed a bit too hard. Maybe it was nothing dramatic at all, just an ordinary distracted goodbye, which is somehow worse, because there is nothing there big enough to explain the size of what you are feeling.

You would give anything. Not to change the outcome, you have stopped bargaining for that. Just for that one conversation. Ninety seconds of full attention, with the phone off, saying the thing you have said in your head ten thousand times since.

And you cannot. That is the thing. There is no version of any of this where you get to make that call again.

Stay here a minute. I am not going to rush you off this grass.

He knows exactly what we are made of

I am going to be honest with you first, because after three weeks of people being kind at you, I think there is a hunger in you for someone to just say the true thing.

This cannot be fixed. Not by me, not by a verse, not by time. The conversation happened the way it happened and there is no repair available in this world, and every single person who has told you not to think like that has been asking you to do something impossible.

So I am not going to tell you it does not matter. It matters. That is why it hurts. You are not being irrational, you are grieving a person and grieving a moment at the same time, and the moment is the one you can get your hands on, so your mind goes there and stands in it and will not leave.

And I will not tell you there was a reason for the timing, or that it was meant, or any of the other sentences people reach for at a graveside because silence frightens them. I do not believe them and neither do you. A death is a death. Scripture calls it the last enemy, and He has never once asked you to pretend otherwise. The Spirit who comes to comfort you does not begin by asking you to lie about what happened.

Now, when you are ready, look at what David says God knows about you.

For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

Read the second verb. Remembers.

Not: overlooks. Not: makes allowances for, the way a tired parent does. Remembers. It is a settled, permanent piece of knowledge that God holds about human beings and never once puts down: that we are made of the ground. That we get distracted. That we are tired at four in the afternoon in a car park with a trolley half in the boot. That we say later on a Sunday and mean it and do not get to it.

He is not up there evaluating your last phone call and finding it thin. He knew you were dust before you ever picked up. He built the frame. He is the only one in this entire story who was never surprised by you. That line was written down three thousand years ago and the Spirit has been carrying it ever since, and tonight He carries it as far as a supermarket car park and a trolley half in and half out of a boot.

And here is what I need you to see about that verse. It comes in the middle of a psalm about compassion. David is not explaining why God overlooks us. He is explaining why God is tender with us. The dust is the reason for the tenderness, not an excuse God has to accept.

Ask the Spirit to read Psalm 103 over you again, slowly, and watch who it is actually describing. So the God you are standing in front of on this grass is not holding forty seconds against you. He is holding you.