Over there is your great-uncle Francis and here is your great-great-uncle Thomas. Your great aunt Maud is there and Mary, your second cousin twice removed, is here. And you are standing on your great-great uncle Mark. I jumped! Great aunt Carol had taken me with her on her annual Memorial Day visit to the cemetery where her family, and mine, were buried. I have not taken up her practice but I think of her every year. It is some comfort to me, not just for the people whom I had never met and whose names I heard for the first time that day, but for all the people I have known that have passed away.
Memorial Day - Scouts decorate veterans’ graves with flags. People barbecue. And sometimes we remember.
This year I am thinking about the girl in the gospel, twelve years of age, who lay on her death bed as Jesus tarried on the way, to heal a woman of seventeen years’ affliction. He came, but apparently too late: “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” Jesus nevertheless went to the child’s bedside, saying, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” They laughed at him. But he dismissed the crowd, and took the girl by the hand: “Little girl, get up!” (Mark 5:21-43)
William Temple says, maybe Jesus wasn’t wrong. Maybe Jesus knew what he was doing. Maybe the girl was at the point of death.
Or maybe “sleeping” was just a figure of speech. In any case, the father was in distress, and anticipating the end of his daughter’s life, when he came to Jesus in the first place.
Anticipatory grief, grief in advance of the expected loss, can take many forms. The desperate plea of a father - not so desperate, as he had faith that this faith-healer could make his daughter well - or the casual disbelief of the onlooking crowd.
What we are assured of is that those who are going before us into that good night are, like us, in the hands of God. There may be no great-aunt Carol for us to remember us, but we are held in an eternal embrace, which has not just started but has always been. For God is love, and that love is eternal. And in it we dwell.
"For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies." (Lamentations 3:31-32)
"For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. For he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world were healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth: (For righteousness is immortal:) For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity." (Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23)
"Remembering loved ones lost," Arizona Daily Star, Keeping the Faith, June 6, 2021. https://tucson.com/lifestyles/remembering-loved-ones-lost/article_dd5e2100-bdb6-11eb-a65a-7b667ac3ff6e.html
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