Family circles

Looking back, I realize I failed to follow up on a line of thought in a previous post, and that loop needs to be closed.

I said that despite my pastor's gentle encouragement, I didn't cry when my mom died.

For the record, that situation was rectified on the Sunday after the funeral, when the freakin' dam burst.

That same pastor, Dennis Butts, had come over and sat down next to me. He asked me if I remembered what he had told me earlier, that it was OK to cry. I told him I did remember, but that's just not the way my grief was coming out. He just sat there with me for a couple of minutes, neither one of us saying anything.

"It's OK to cry."

Pastor Butts is a big bear of a man at better than 6 feet tall and better than 200 pounds. He carries a large, quiet, powerful presence, much as my dad did. That presence began to overshadow me that day on the front pew -- enveloping me, drawing me in, surrounding me, subsuming me. I felt like I was inside a small, dark closet, in the deepest shadows behind the long winter coats. I felt safe.

That's when I absolutely lost it, sobbing inconsolably on that front pew for 20 minutes after the service ended.

I could hear people chatting, some stopping to ask MLW what was wrong with me, random people placing a hand on my shoulder or offering a word of comfort, and the tears and snot pouring out. Someone finally had the good sense and compassion to stuff a couple of tissues into my hand.

That day it became clearer to me than ever that I had a new family. It didn't replace my birth family but augmented it. I felt safe enough to cry like a baby in front of these people, and they responded with love, comfort, empathy and compassion.

Less than three weeks later, when my father also died, my tears were warmed up and ready to go, and go they did. My hysterical reaction at the hospital remains one of the more memorable entries in my family's grief scrapbook.

But it's all good. MLW and my sister Sheila stayed with me to comfort me while I was treated (read: sedated) in the emergency room, and no one made fun of me when we eventually made it back to the house, where we sat around the dining room table in stunned disbelief.

Both my families had their finest hours in the days and weeks that followed. My birth family, without exception, demonstrated kindness and grace to a degree that I had never seen in many of them before, and it helped heal some old wounds in me. My church family, which I already knew to be full of kindness and grace, proved generous and gentle as well, weeping and grieving with us, taking on themselves the loss of two people they had never known.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge as well the kindness of my co-workers, who sent stacks of cards and food and sent flowers to the funeral home and covered my extended absence from work without a word of complaint.

It's true that there's a lot of bad stuff and a lot of bad people in this world. But these moments and these memories remind me that God looks after his own:

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy
dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with
singing;
... You gave abundant showers, O God;
You refreshed your weary inheritance. -- Psalm 68:5-6a;9

I apologize for writing so much about death and grief lately. It's a season the Spirit has sent me into, and I'm walking through it. Which reminds me of something another member of my church family, a man named Brother Herman, said a couple of years ago:

"Psalm 23 says, 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ...'
Notice that it says 'walk through'; it doesn't say 'set up camp in.'"

Thanks for that, Brother Herman. Thanks to all my brothers and sisters. And thanks, God, for them.