The Joyful Widower

I wrote the following 10 years ago today, after the funeral of an infant. May her memory be eternal!

Today sharpened for me why I think a “celebration of life” is nowhere near as helpful or as healing to the soul as a straight-out, honest-to-God (and honest-to-ourselves) funeral. Today at St. Anne’s we buried an infant, born at 25 weeks, who struggled for four days in NICU before her death.

How do you make a powerpoint slideshow of happy pictures to celebrate so short a life? You can’t. Situations like this are where the “celebration of life” breaks down. It’s easy to put together photo albums of one who has lived a long life, but the current way of dealing with death is so inadequate in a case like this. Our culture wants us to not be sad. The truth is, sometimes life is sad. Tragically so. There are times we can’t get away from that, nor should we. This isn’t morbidity; it’s honesty. The best way to deal with grief is not to deny it but to admit it. Feel it. Be sad. Cry. Rage. Argue with God; He can take it. Sing dirges. Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, even when he knew he would raise Lazarus from the dead. Why, then, did he weep, unless it was because the dissolution of one created in the Image of God is wrong? Come together as a community with the family of the bereaved. Pray for the family and friends. Pray for the departed. Your turn will come when you will be the one prayed for. Times like this call for frankness. We need to come to grips with the fact that death comes for all of us, whether in the womb, the cradle, adolescence, middle-age, or old age. It will come for me, it will come for you.

Only when you’ve truly felt the pain can you make your way to feeling the comfort; only when you’ve engaged the grief and looked long and hard at the fact that you are mortal, that you came from the earth and to the earth you shall return again, can you find deep meaning in life. Anything else is just taking baby aspirin for a gaping chest wound.

Christ is risen. This is not a cheap anodyne lightly tossed out, but a profound statement of hope, that the chaos and absurdity and tragedy of this world do not get the last word. Christ is risen, but there is no rising without a descent first. There is no resurrection but that one has first died. The one does not come without the other. Only when you honestly look at death can you see the true beauty of life.