Thursday, November 18, 2010

Saints and Souls

Saints and Souls
“. . . and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place in the heavens.”
(Book of Common Prayer, “Commemoration of the Dead,” p. 382)
I recently returned from a visit to Buffalo, NY where I visited what little family I have left on my mother’s side – my uncle and aunt, a cousin and my cousins’ children.  During an afternoon conversation with my aunt, I realized that she remains crushed that her younger son, Michael, “passed on” just last May. He was only 55.  I guess I should not have expected anything else since I had gone through that experience with my own mom and dad when my younger brother died thirteen years ago. 
Aunt Sophie could barely speak about Mike without getting teary eyed.  The normally jovial eyes turned deeply sad in a way I had never seen.  Mike suffered debilitating and chronic pain that resulted from an auto accident over 15 years ago.  At the time he died, we consoled ourselves that he was finally free from such suffering and at peace.  But that is really little consolation for those who look for, but cannot find, his face.
Those of us who have lost someone we loved know the emptiness and hopelessness that can sweep over us in the first months of mourning.  The loss carries such pain with it that we wonder if we can go on in this life ourselves, and sometimes we even wish for death to come and take us, too.  We find ourselves fascinated in a painful way with the moment our loved one experienced death, reliving it again and again in our mind, wanting to go back to it.  Maybe hoping we can reverse it. 
For those who mourn, the lost one is frozen in the moment of death and for a while that is all we see.  But that’s not the really true.  Our loved one is not frozen like a statue that covers a crypt – perfect but lifeless.  The one who is loved and lost has passed through death to the other side.  We who remain may be stuck like statues in that terrible moment, but the one who was loved is not.  We may come to glimpse this now and then, and the glimpse itself brings comfort.  Life goes on, for them, as well as for us.  It remains painful to miss them so.  But they live, still.
“ . . . and I believe in the resurrection of the dead.
And the life of the world to come.  AMEN.

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