I met Mary when I was nine years old, and she became like a second mother to me. Tennis matches every Saturday, family vacations to the Lake every summer, mother-daughter excursions, neighborhood game nights, in-home manicures, and scavenger hunts at the farm were just a smattering of the joyful chapters we shared. She threw a party for me on the occasion of my ordination. When Dave and I married and as I began my adult life, she remained on call to answer culinary questions if my own mom wasn’t home to answer the kitchen emergency. On Thursday, I prayed over her grave as we honored her 87 years. Riding in the black limo/vans, her children and I shared stories – some hilarious and slightly inappropriate and some sacred and moving. How is it that this 5’1” woman towered spiritually over most of us while feeding us an infinite supply of homemade cookies? All day long I kept thinking of the opening lines of Wendell Berry’s poem “Ripening”:
The longer we are together
The larger death grows around us
It should not surprise me that death comes. Almost weekly I spend time preparing for death, honoring the dead, supporting those who are grieving profound loss. And yet, the intensity of loss sometimes invades like an unwelcome guest.
Sometimes grief arrives incrementally instead of with an immediate shoosh. It creeps in and steals a moment we never imagined fading. A grandmother forgets her neighbor’s name. A father struggles to stand up from his chair. A circle of bridge players finds itself short of two of its charter members. Like the incessant peck peck peck of the woodpecker on the side of the house, life recedes. A friend who guarded your secret for decades is now gone.
We know that the Psalmist praises God for long life that is 70 or 80 years, but how do we make sense of a world where a 30-year-old honors college graduate is so stricken with despair that he robs himself of breath or a future, adding to the mounting suicide statistics? How do we pick up the pieces after a freak accident or a rare disease lands someone in the prime of their life in the obituaries?
And even in the course of a joyful and ordinary life, we say goodbye forever to what has been our life’s constant companion. Never again preschool half-days, as a 5-year-old boy bounces into his first day of Kindergarten; the nest of four is unsettled as the oldest daughter launches her freshman year of college in another state.
I love how Wendell Berry describes the bitterness of loss. The sugar intensifies inside the fruit as it shrivels. And yet we can taste the sweetness of ripening.
Grace and Peace,
Carla
