that winter road

We walk the winter road like Job’s friends, the three of us–Riley, Josh, and me, coming from a distance, the wind whipping at the hem of my black lace dress, the edge of Josh’s dark coat, the smooth ends of Riley’s brassy bob.  Riley’s eye shadow looks, I notice just this moment, like smudges of soot, her lashes long and impossibly dark.

Up ahead, I see the swollen shape of a glossy black hearse sitting right out front of the little church.

“Almost there,” I say, glancing over my shoulder.  We had driven two blocks away in search of parking, because the community offering presence had spilled out of two parking lots already.  Cars line the edges of the road.  I watch others amble down the sidewalk toward the little church, thinking that in the end there is nothing worth displaying of earthly wealth, that there is only this wealth of love, of people showing up to sit and remember.

“Almost there,” Riley repeats, agreeably.  She and Josh are holding hands, their fingers carefully interlaced.

A friend of Riley and Josh and Adam, a sweet young man with a generous smile, has lost his mom.  I didn’t know her very well, but I have seen her kindness and love in her son, and as every mama knows, that represents the very best kind of legacy.

We reach the sprawling concrete porch outside the little church and grip the wrought iron rails and pull open the old wooden door, and a few gentlemen with carnations tucked into the lapels of their crisp suits nod and murmur a warm welcome.

We stand in the lobby, waiting to sign a memorial book that sits propped on a tiny podium outside the doors of the church auditorium.  A woman in a polka dot dress bends over the book, that roll of rememberers, tugging readers out of her purse. I glance over my shoulder again, and Riley offers me a polite smile.

For reasons I can only attribute to Riley’s genuine and heartfelt love, this friend has always shown her special affection, and even though it’s been a while since she graduated from the school where they met, in the weeks just before his loss, friend had been asking almost daily after Riley, how she is, where she is, how to get in touch with her.  I don’t know if he sensed the shadows of the valley ahead, but the day I got the news about his mom, I knew that words wouldn’t touch his grief at all, but that Riley’s presence at the funeral just might.

Word is that Job’s friends raised their voices and tore their robes and wept when they came to sit with him in loss; that they sprinkled dust on their heads.  For a whole week, those friends just sat on the ground beside him, silent, because they could see his terrible suffering.  This was before their self-serving speeches.  This was when true wisdom prevailed and they gave their presence, collectively, as the gift.

I sit back on my heels, waiting while polka dots turns to the man behind her, pen still poised, pointing out a name in the book.

Riley had chosen Merry Christmas leggings to wear for the occasion, but these I had convinced her to change before we left, this being a January funeral, and yet, an unsettling incongruency does prevail at occasions such as these, especially for people of faith.  There is both the somber, excruciating, tearful pain of loss and the simmering joy, the swell of living hope, over a promised eternal reunion fulfilled in Christ.  It’s a celebration of life, everyone says, repeating this phrase for encouragement, meanwhile, through the open double doors, I hear someone groaning in deep grief.

“If you want to go in, you should probably go ahead,” a man says now, reaching up toward the fedora on his head as he moves to remove it.  I look toward him in time to catch his gentle smile.  “They’re getting ready to close the doors.”

So, we skip the book and walk in, Riley, Josh, and me, and an usher leads us toward a row that is full on both ends but empty in the middle.  We wait while a few women hoist themselves up out of the pew so we can fill the empty spaces.  I settle in and look around the room, watching as the ushers bring in extra chairs, unfolding them into the aisles.

All these people.  Almost too many to fit in the little church, certainly too many to notice as individuals, and yet we sit in all our various shapes, different even in how we occupy the room, how we fold and drape our arms and legs, how we sound when we breathe.  I spy some of the teachers from our school, sitting just a few rows ahead of us.  The woman beside me, who has a beauty I can feel, softly murmurs scripture from memory every time someone quotes it from the front of the room.

You could count us; someone probably already has, and yet what really counts is our collective presence here, how in assembly we re-member one body with our many.  Even so, count on us to undervalue the impact of our individual obscurity; count on us, like Job’s friends, to lose track of why we’ve come.

We sing for awhile of Jesus, songs I’ve known for years, our voices weaving together, and I realize that even though I don’t know very many of the people in the room, I feel right at home beside them.  Riley’s bold, bright voice carries, just above Josh’s deeper, quieter one.  I look down the row toward them, noticing Josh’s hand still holding Riley’s, their fingers still carefully, tightly, interlaced.  The woman beside me reaches over and pats my arm, just lightly, with her hand.

I have been thinking quite a lot lately about how with-ness really is a great comfort for our pain.  When words fail, and deep in the pit they always do, we are left with one good gift to offer each other, just our nearness.  And as the family of God, our nearness always points to His.  The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, the Psalmist wrote, and all through the gospels, Jesus moved toward hurting and challenged and difficult people, compassion twisting His body from within.  He moves toward when I would move away, showing me again how to love.

At the end of the service, this heavy re-membering, this celebration of a life not gone but still living, still changing other lives, the ushers dismiss us and lead us from the room row by row until, toward the last, everyone gives up on being orderly.  We find our teacher friends and hug them, trying to talk over shoulders and backs as we follow the crowd from the room.

I look everywhere for signs of Riley’s and Josh’s and Adam’s friend, the one who lost his mom, who had left the room holding his grandmother’s hand, because this is why we came, or so I originally thought, so that Riley and Josh could show up for him, could see him, but friend is nowhere that I can see.

As I am scanning the groups of people who have paused to talk on their way out of the building, one of our teachers wonders aloud if the family has already been loaded into the cars that will follow the hearse.

So, we say our goodbyes, walking again down the winter road, with the wind whipping around us and chilling our arms.  I look up at the sky, that thick blanket of cloud trying in vain to block the light, remembering something a friend told me recently, that the earth, in its rotating orbit, had just traveled as close as it ever gets to the sun.  We discussed how odd it felt to know that on a cold, wintery day when the place where we live has rotated away; how odd, to know the sun sits so near, even though we can’t feel its warmth.

The Lord, with His love so high and wide and deep and long as to be beyond the limits of our knowing, is near to the brokenhearted.  As Riley and Josh and I walk along the road back toward the car, I find myself wondering if the point of all our crowding close, our sitting together in loss, really is that we might wordlessly embody for each other what might otherwise feel very strange to know, that however isolated we may feel by our sadness, our vast God remains closest of all.