What is Lost

When you have experienced loss in aching ways there comes a time when you are expected to be finished with your mourning. One year, two, the imaginary line is drawn and you feel guilty mentioning the thing that you once held more dearly than anything else. You might be grieving a friend, a husband, a brother. Perhaps a relationship or a home or a job. But what you are grieving and what you have lost are different things. What you have lost is security, the knowingness, and no matter how much warning you are given, there is no way to prepare for a mourning of this kind.

So you dip your head, you close your eyes, you let your hands rest in the soapy dishwater until they are wrinkled, the skin as translucent as your heart these days. People are patient and careful with you, afraid of your fragile skin and see-through heart. And you are grateful for the ones who say nothing, simply put their warm hand on your cold and crooked neck. And you are most grateful for your own bed, your covers which wrap you tightly because it is security you miss more than anything.

But there comes a time when people begin to wonder about your overgrown grass and glassy eyes. "Isn't it about time…" they say, with their heads nodding like bobble heads in the backs of New York City taxi cabs, plastic and too large for their bodies.

And so you begin cutting your grass and looking people in the eye again. You nod to them in the grocery store, even if you don't remember they brought you five casseroles in a row once. You no longer talk about what you grieve in the present tense.

Years later you casually mention what you lost once, surprising yourself with the cavalier tone—are you turning into a bobble head too? But you still go home, wrap yourself in your covers, knowing joy comes in the mourning and in the morning too.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. I Thessalonians 4:13

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This has been sitting in my draft folder for a while now, but over this past week several people in my life have lost loved ones and so I thought it apropos to post. Grieving looks different for everyone, but we are still called to mourn with those who mourn. Pray we would mourn well alongside them, with hope against hope.