I went to a funeral this morning.
While this was a shocking, awful death that affected someone I love, it was not someone I knew well but had only met a few times. For me, the funeral itself was not a time of true grieving but of simply being there for a friend whose life has been flipped upside down.
But I sat there, and the images came flying through my mind, more and more rapid. Donnie’s funeral in 2004. The last funeral I went to at our church, last fall, for the dear woman who kept Hannah in the nursery. Jeffrey's funeral, that of a fallen soldier. Watching Mike's funeral via my computer, sobbing, haunted for weeks and months over his suicide. And always, always, Stephanie’s, the immense pressing sick feelings of that day just weeks before my high school graduation.
You don’t know my names, my lost loved ones, but you know yours.
As I grow older the list grows longer. I’ve gone to more funerals that I can count on both hands now, and I know they just come faster as I age. Maybe it’s my off-the-charts Meyers-Briggs “F” for feeling that rushes up every memory associated with death each time I sit in a pew grasping tissues. Maybe it’s just human.
Grief is an odd acquaintance. It never goes completely away. It changes form and place, morphing into a nag at the back of the head that sometimes you forget is even there. And then, a trigger. And it’s there in your face, haunting you, once again. I don’t know what I’m trying to say except that today, I am grieving. For people gone one and six and ten and fourteen and eighteen years ago, and more. So if you’re grieving today, over a person or a loss or a dead dream, I want you to know I’m walking along with you.
Grief is normal, and OK, and good.
“We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.” -Eugene Kennedy, The Pain of Being Human
