You Were Not on the List of People to Call

Twenty to nine on a Tuesday morning, in the car, in the supermarket car park, with the engine off.

She has ten minutes before she has to go in, and she is doing the thing everybody does with ten minutes, which is scroll. Someone's kitchen. Someone's dog. A recipe she is not going to make.

Then: rest easy, mate.

She keeps going for about half a second on momentum, the way you do, and then her thumb comes back up.

Then another one. Then a photograph of him at somebody's wedding, red faced, laughing at whoever is behind the camera, in a suit he had clearly hired.

She scrolls up. Up and up, past all of it, trying to find the first one, the one that says it in plain words, because none of these are saying it in plain words and she needs somebody to say it in plain words.

She finds it. It is dated eleven days ago.

The funeral was the previous Thursday. On the previous Thursday she was at her desk, and she had a sandwich at her desk, and she was mildly annoyed about a spreadsheet.

She goes to the messages. Twenty two years of them, back to the summer they were seventeen, and the last one is his and it says ha, yes. next month? and it was sent in March.

She sits there. The car park fills up around her. Somebody parks badly next to her and gets out and does not look at her, because there is nothing to look at, just a woman in a car with her phone in her lap.

Nobody rang. Not out of anything. His mother made a list, and his mother's list was made of the names his mother knew, and twenty two years of a friendship that lived mostly in cars and pubs and messages does not always reach a mother's address book. His wife has never met her. There is nobody in that family who could have picked up a phone and thought of her name, because to them she is a face in the background of about four photographs.

And now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you have got your own version of that morning. You know how you found out. You know the time of day and where you were standing, and you know the exact horrible little gap between reading it and believing it.

And then you found out that the whole thing had already happened. The service, the flowers, the sandwiches in a function room, all of it, done and cleared away while you were at work being mildly annoyed about something.

So there is nowhere to put it. You cannot ring his wife, because you have never spoken to her. You cannot send flowers eleven days late. There is no card, nobody at work knows to be gentle with you, and you cannot even say I lost a friend without somebody asking a follow up question you cannot survive answering.

You are grieving a person you loved for half your life, and there is no category in the world for what you are.

There is no rank in grief

I am not going to move you along from this. Sit here a minute, because I want to name what actually happened to you, in order, and not soften a single part of it.

Your friend died.

Then, separately, and on a different day, you found out. Which means you lost him twice, and the second time you lost him alone in a car park.

Then you discovered you had been outside the whole thing without knowing it. Not excluded. Overlooked, which is a stranger and lonelier word. Nobody decided you did not matter. That would almost be easier, because at least it would be a decision, and a decision can be argued with. Instead there was simply a list, made at four in the morning by a mother who could barely hold the phone, and your name was not on it, and there was no malice anywhere in the whole thing.

That is the part that has nowhere to go. You are angry, and there is nobody to be angry at. You are wounded, and nobody did it. Both of those are true at once, and holding them both is exhausting, and you have been doing it on your own for however long it has been. You are not holding them on your own tonight. The shortest verse in the book was written about a God who reached the weeping before He reached the tomb, and His Spirit is why it gets as far as a car park with the engine off.

And under all of it is the question you would never say out loud: does this even count. Was I entitled to this much. Am I making it about me.

Let me put something down beside you.

When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.John 11:33

Two verses later there is a sentence so short that people learn it as a novelty, and it is the least novel sentence in the whole book.

Jesus wept.

Now understand where He was standing when He did it. He was four days late to a death He had been told about. He was on His way to a tomb. And He knew, entirely, exactly what He was about to do at that tomb, which means He was the only person in that crowd who was not facing the worst.

And He cried anyway.

I want to be careful with you here, because grief gets handled roughly by people quoting this story. I am not telling you about Lazarus because there is a stone about to be rolled away in your story. I am telling you because of what happened before the stone, in the road, in front of everybody.

He did not manage the moment. He did not explain it. He did not tell Martha that everything happens for a reason, and He did not tell Mary that her brother was needed elsewhere. He looked at a crowd of people crying and something went through Him, and the word underneath it in the original is not a gentle one. It is closer to a shudder. Then His face went, in public, in front of a crowd who immediately started commenting on it.

That is God, standing at the edge of a grave, undone.

So take your question, the one about whether you are entitled to this, and put it down. Nobody in that road had to prove their standing before they were allowed to cry, and nobody checked whether their grief was proportionate to their place in the family. He wept with the people who were weeping. That was the whole of the qualification.

Yours counts. It counted from the first second in the car park. It did not need a phone call to make it real, and the absence of a phone call did not make it smaller. That is not my kindness toward you. In a road where nobody was checking credentials, John 11:33 settled it. The Spirit does not leave that lying on a page: He stands it up beside your seat belt and your unopened messages.