The Loss Nobody Sent a Card For

The mug is still in the front row of the cupboard, second shelf, handle turned out the way they always got put away.

Three in the afternoon on a Sunday, which is the worst hour of the worst day, and she has been standing at the open cupboard door for longer than a person needs to stand at an open cupboard door. She only wanted a mug. There are eleven in there. She takes hers off the end and closes the door and the other one stays where it is, because moving it would be a decision, and she has been making decisions since January and she is out.

She makes the tea and she does not drink it. She sits at the table with the gray Sunday light coming in and the heating ticking on, and the house has that particular silence it only has at three o'clock, where you can hear next door's television through the wall and somebody's car door and children in a garden four houses down.

When her mother died, two years ago, there were forty cards on that windowsill. There was a lasagne on the step within a day. Somebody she barely knew came and did her ironing and would not be argued with, and there was a service, and a room full of people, and a sandwich afterwards, and every single person in that room said the words: I am so sorry for your loss.

Nobody has said those words this year. Not once.

People ask how she is getting on. Getting on. As if it were a house move. As if there were boxes. Somebody at work said, kindly, that she seemed to be doing really well, and she smiled and said thanks, and went and stood in the toilets for four minutes with her hand over her mouth.

And I am going to stop saying she now.

Because you know that cupboard. You know which shelf, and you know that you have not moved it, and you know precisely why you have not moved it, and you have never said that out loud to anybody.

You are bereaved. That is the word and nobody has offered it to you, and you have not dared to use it about yourself because the person is still alive and still walking around and might well be in a supermarket eleven minutes from here right now. So the grief has nowhere to go. There is no body. There is no service. There is no hour in the calendar where everybody agrees to be sad with you. There is only Sunday at three, and a mug on a shelf, and a whole future that used to be furnished and is now an empty room, and the terrible additional job of behaving normally about it.

And nobody sent a card.

I am going to call this what it is

It is a death.

I am not softening that and I am not decorating it. Something real has died. A life you were building with your hands died. Christmases died, and a way of saying a certain joke died, and a person who knew what you were like at twenty five died, and the version of your old age that you had quietly assumed since you were young died, and every one of those is a separate loss and you are carrying all of them at once with no ceremony for any of them.

And I want to say the harder thing too, because you know it and nobody says it. Psalm 147:3 was written for exactly this, and His Spirit does not wait for a service to be held before He treats what happened to you as a bereavement.

This grief comes with an audit attached. When a person dies, sympathy arrives with no questions. When a marriage ends, people want to know the story first. They are working out how sad they are allowed to be, and who was at fault, and where to put you. So you have learned to give a short version at the school gate, and to watch faces, and to grieve privately and behave publicly, which is the loneliest arrangement there is.

I am not going to hand you a reason for this. There are sentences that get said to people in your position and they are all false and they all wound: that it happened for a reason, that a door closing means a window opening somewhere, that God has some tidy purpose that makes this arithmetic come out even. I will not say any of that to you. It is not in the Word and it is not true and it insults what you have lost.

Here is what is in the Word. It is one verse, written into the middle of a psalm about the stars, and His Spirit is the reason it comes as far as an open cupboard door instead of staying on the page.

He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Now look at the line that comes immediately after it, because the writer put these two things side by side deliberately and it is one of the most extraordinary joins in Scripture. Straight after the broken hearts, without pausing for breath, he says that God counts the number of the stars and gives names to all of them.

Every one. Named. The ones nobody has seen. The ones nobody has counted, that no instrument has ever found, that no person on this earth knows exist.

That is the same hand. The hand that numbers what cannot be numbered and names what nobody has ever named is the hand that comes to a broken heart. It is not an accident that those two sentences are neighbors. Your loss is the uncounted one. There is no record of it anywhere. No register, no service, no announcement, no card on any windowsill. And He counts it. He has counted it since January. He knows its name and He can say it out loud.

And look at the verb He uses for the wound. Binds up. That is bandaging. It is slow and it is physical and it is done by hands, and anybody who has ever dressed a wound knows what it involves: someone kneeling down, working carefully, wrapping, checking, and then coming back tomorrow and doing the whole thing again, because a wound that is being bound is a wound that is still open.

He is not waving at this from a distance and He is not hurrying you. Binding takes as long as it takes, and while it takes it, you are held rather than assessed. His Spirit keeps saying that over you on the Sundays you feel absolutely nothing, and He is only saying what Psalm 147:3 already put in writing.

I am making no claim to you about the marriage. I do not know, and anyone who tells you they know is not being careful with you. What I am telling you is who is in the kitchen at three o'clock on a Sunday while the heating ticks and next door's television comes through the wall. He is not embarrassed by the mug on the shelf. He is not waiting for you to be further along.