Nobody Holds A Funeral For This

He knows what to do with a death. That is the peculiar cruelty of it.

He has buried perhaps a hundred and forty people. He knows the words, the pace, the pause before the committal, where to stand so the family can see the coffin and not see the mechanism. He knows what to say to a widow at the door afterwards and, more importantly, when to say nothing. He knows that you send something at three months, not at three weeks, because at three weeks the house is full.

He is, by any measure, an expert in the ritual handling of loss.

And there is a set of people in his life who are not dead, whom he has lost, and for whom none of that apparatus exists.

Eight, if he counts. He has counted. Over eleven years: a couple, three individuals, a family of three. All alive. All, as far as he knows, well. Two of them still live within a mile of him. He is not estranged from any of them in a way that would be legible to an outsider; if he met any of them tomorrow it would be perfectly pleasant.

They are simply out of his life, and they were in it, and there was no death and therefore no rite.

Here is what that does over eleven years. Grief that has a form gets processed by the form. That is what liturgy is for. You stand in a cold churchyard and say ancient words and something in a human being is carried by them from one place to another. What he has instead is eight losses with no service, no words, no gathering, no date, and no permission, and so nothing has ever been carried anywhere. It is all still exactly where it landed.

He thought about this properly for the first time last spring, in a graveyard, at a funeral for someone else's father.

He was standing at the head of the grave doing his job perfectly, and he thought: I know exactly what to do here, and I have no idea at all what to do with the other eight.

Scripture commissions the lament

The prophet you want is Jeremiah, and the chapter is the ninth, and what he does in it is weep for people who are not dead.

Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.Jeremiah 9:1

He is grieving a nation that is still standing. The people he is weeping for are walking about, going to market, living their lives. He is not at a graveside. He is mourning a relationship and a nearness and a thing that used to be, and the whole book is his lament for the living.

And then look further down the same chapter, because this is the part that has your name on it.

He tells them to call for the mourning women, and for the cunning women, that they may come and take up a wailing for us. Those were real people with a real job. In that world grief had a public form and could be commissioned, and Jeremiah, faced with a loss that had no burial to hang itself on, calls for the rite anyway.

So hear this over you, standing at somebody else's graveside: you are permitted to hold a service for this. That is not my idea; it is what His word does with a grief that has no funeral, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an ancient commission and hands it to a man who has been carrying eight losses in his coat pocket for eleven years.

Now let me say the thing about form, because you of all people will feel the weight of it.

You have spent your working life knowing that form carries people. You believe it. You have watched it work at a hundred and forty gravesides. And then, in your own case, you have been denied it entirely, and worse, you have half assumed that reaching for it would be self indulgent, because the people concerned are alive and well and it would look absurd.

It would not be absurd. Jeremiah did it. He called for the wailing over people who were still breathing, because a loss is measured by what has gone and not by whether anybody died.

Your grief is not disqualified by their being well. Scripture does not measure sorrow by mortality, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring a death certificate before He will attend to a man who has lost eight people.

And here is the thing I want to leave in your hands, because it is the practical mercy in all this.

You may make the rite. Not a public one. Not a thing anybody attends. But you know better than almost anybody alive what a service is for and how it works, and there is nothing whatever to stop a man writing eight names on a page, saying the words he would say for anybody else, and letting the form do for him what he has watched it do for a hundred and forty families.

You are held while you do it. His word gives lament a place, a form and a commission, and the Holy Spirit has been waiting eleven years for a man to give himself the same thing he has given everybody else.

I want to add one plain thing, because this is heavy and it is written for somebody carrying a great deal. If any of this has gone further than sorrow lately, if there have been thoughts you would not repeat to anyone, please do not sit alone with that tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real person before you sleep. That is not a failure in a man who handles other people's grief. That is somebody taking up the wailing with you, and Scripture is where the idea comes from.