Death dumbfounds us. Which is odd, considering that we know it’s coming—all things die. Still, we are confounded, shaken, unnerved and bewildered by death. The unexpected death of a loved one can leave us literally dumb, stunned into silence.
Tonight was my sister-in-law’s viewing or visitation, the precursor to an open-casket funeral that is still common practice in small-town Iowa. It’s been less than a week since we got the text that said Jennifer, 70, had a brain aneurysm. She never regained consciousness. No last words, no last glances. No chance to say goodbye.
“My wife is dead. I don’t know how to live without her,” says Matt, a young husband and new father whose wife died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism, leaving him a widower with a baby to raise. No last words, no chance to say goodbye.
Where is God in our march toward death, either slow or fast, but always onward? When optimism becomes delusion, and hope finally fails, and we are left feeling forsaken by a silent God?” These are the questions that Michael Gerson asks in his column “Where is God” for The Washington Post. He writes of Christ as the divine breaking into our small lives on a tiny planet circling an average star–one of billions upon billions. Dumbfounding, when you think about it.
During those few days when Jennifer lay brain dead, her husband, Bob, and sons by her bedside, my own grandchildren were visiting, filling my house with laughter and chaos as only young children can. Life and death collided, overlapped, each demanding its due, and finally intertwined.
It’s all intertwined, for Sister Miriam McGillis. Everything in the universe is divine revelation: the earth, trees, the carbon in our bodies, life itself. “It’s all grace if we recognize it,” says Sister Miriam in Genesis Farm: Restoring Paradise.
I recognize it at the visitation, where Bob and his sons greet the ever-widening circle of Jennifer’s family, friends and former students who came in droves to pay their respects, grasp a hand, or hug and laugh. So much laughter. From family catching up, sharing memories. From the children running around, who stop suddenly in front of the casket to look and look silently on the waxen face of death, then spin away again, weaving fast through the adults and vanishing into the rooms beyond to play their children’s games.
Tomorrow is the funeral. The grandchildren will sing “Jesus Loves Me.” We will give Jennifer back, consigning her carbon to the ground and commending what is no longer here, what even the youngest children recognized as now-absent, to the God who breaks into our common lives with “courage and comfort in the midst of the ordinary, the just and the unthinkable,” as Gerson says. The God who kindles and sustains hope, the God who is the love at the heart of all things.
