The Loss You Have Not Said Out Loud

Twenty past two on a Wednesday afternoon, and she is at the sink with her hands in the water and the tap already off, and she has been standing like that for a while.

What happened was the chemist. A woman she half knows was ahead of her in the queue and turned round and was kind, genuinely kind, and asked how her brother had died.

And she heard herself say: suddenly.

She has said it eleven times now. She keeps a word for this the way you keep a spare key. It works. The other person's face softens, they say something about how awful, and the conversation moves along to the weather or the roadworks, and everybody gets out unhurt.

She drove home and did the shopping and put it away and then stood at the sink, and the thing that got her was not the woman in the queue. It was that she had done it so smoothly. She has become fluent.

Because here is what she has learned in five months. There is a grief people know how to come to, and there is hers.

When it is an illness, people bring food and sit down and ask about the last weeks and let you tell the story, and the telling of it is medicine. When it is hers, there is a small pause in the room after they find out, about a second long, and after that pause the conversation is a different conversation, and nobody ever comes back to it.

So the casseroles came for eight days and then the street went quiet. Two people said something clumsy about it that she cannot get out of her head. One person said nothing at all, which was somehow worse, and now crosses the road. And her own family has a version of him they have all silently agreed to say out loud, which is not him, and she cannot correct it without opening the very door everyone is standing against.

And so she has stopped saying his name in company. Then, without noticing when it happened, she stopped saying it at all.

I am going to stop describing her now, because I do not think this is a woman at a sink. I think this is you, and I think you have your own word that you keep by the door.

Your person died by suicide. There. I have said the sentence you cannot get anybody to stay in the room for, and I am still here, and I am not going anywhere.

There is a psalm that ends in the dark, and it was left in on purpose

I want to name the ground under your feet before I say one single hopeful thing, because hope arrived too early from people who could not bear the silence, and it made you lonelier. What I set beside you here is not mine. It is the written word. The Spirit of God carries it the last few inches into a kitchen at twenty past two, which is further than any sentence of mine has ever gone.

You are carrying two losses. Everybody talks about the first one. Almost nobody names the second.

The first is that a person you love is dead.

The second is that you have been quietly refused the ordinary things that carry a person through a death. The conversation on the doorstep. The retelling. The room where somebody says his name without their voice going careful. You have been left with an enormous grief and no acceptable language for it, and you have spent five months doing the extra work of making other people comfortable about the worst thing that has ever happened to you.

That is a monstrous amount to ask of somebody, and nobody asked you if you could carry it. You just started carrying it because there was nothing else on the floor. So hear where the weight actually sits. It has not been your composure holding that street up since the eighth day, when the casseroles stopped and nobody came back. His Spirit has. Psalm 68:6 is written down for exactly this, that God sets the solitary in families.

And underneath both of those there is the room you go into at three in the morning, where you run it. The last conversation. The thing you said. The thing you did not say. The Tuesday you were tired and short with him. The signs you have gone back and rearranged into an order that makes them look obvious, when they were not obvious, and you were living forwards like every other human being on this earth.

Let me be very plain with you, because you have not had plain. I am not going to take that trial you are running and adjudicate it, in either direction. I am going to tell you that I do not accept the verdict you have been handing yourself in the dark, and neither does the God who has been in that room with you at three in the morning every single time.

Now let me show you something that is actually written into the book, and it stayed there because the Spirit of God saw to it.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is the last line of the psalm. Not the last line of a section. The last line. It does not turn. There is no but God, no lifting at the end, no tidy resolution in the final verse the way there is in almost every other psalm in the collection.

It ends in the dark, and God left it in.

Think about what that means for a moment. Somebody could have edited that. Somebody, at some point, could have put a hopeful couplet on the end and made it easier to sing. Nobody did. It stands there in the middle of the songbook of God's own people, a prayer that ends with the word darkness, because there are nights that end that way and God refused to pretend otherwise.

Your grief has a page. It is not too dark for the book. It never was. And you are not the first person God has kept company with at the end of a psalm that did not turn. Psalm 88 stands in His songbook unedited, kept there by the same Spirit who is at your sink this evening with the tap already off.

And there is one more thing I will say and then I will stop, because it is the question underneath all the others and you have been afraid to ask it.

I carry no verdict on the person you lost. Not one, and not in either direction, and anybody who hands you one is telling you about themselves. What I know is what God is like: that He is merciful beyond the reach of anyone's imagination, that He alone sees what happened in a mind on its worst night, and that He is not the frightened caricature somebody once described to you. That is where I stop, honestly, and I would rather stop honestly than comfort you with something I do not have.