Other people's grief

It is seven in the morning, and the beginning glow of morning is taking hold. The ground is covered with white snow, and the cloudy sky is glowing with a slight touch of pink.

Last weekend, I played accompaniment and sang descanto at a funeral. Yesterday I went to the funeral of a childhood neighbour, and today I am doing the music at a healing service. Ive been surrounded by other people's grief, and I suppose I am having a brief taste of what that must be like for a priest. And it isn't as awful as I always imagined it to be.

While there are certainly no joys in watching people suffer, grief is a terrible but potent reminder that love is in the world. People may leave the world, but the love others have for them does not. It is a little different every time I see it. At the memorials we have had in my wife's family, there is always, amid the grief, a certain degree of silliness: my brother in law wearing a chicken hat, me inserting funny lyrics into one of the songs, my wife bringing her mother's ashes to chaperone us at family camp.

Yesterday, there was none of that, because people do not do grief the same way. Instead, there was a brother, broken up, delivering an eulogy off the cuff. He asked simple questions: "Who's going to make me laugh? Who's going to fix my car?" There are only heartbreaking answers for the moment.

Funerals are for us, ultimately. They help us begin to picture the rest of our lives and make sense of it. Although it is beautiful to send people off with all of our love and affection, they already bask in it in a way that is beyond all understanding. For those who leave us, every tear will be wiped away, and there is no more sorrow. There are many rooms in the Father's house, and a Father who has waited a long time to greet us Himself.