This Is Not The First One I Have Lost

Nineteen seventy nine, which was a tiny place with a bad roof. Nineteen ninety four, which came apart over a survey. Two thousand and eight, and we do not need to talk about two thousand and eight.

And now this one.

You have a filing system for it by now. You know the shape of the week afterward and you know which day is the bad one, which is not the first day, it is about the fourth. You know that you will be all right by about the tenth, and you generally are.

And your daughter said you are the strongest person she knows. She said it on the phone on Sunday and she meant it as the highest thing she had to give.

And you said thank you, love, and you got off the phone and sat in the kitchen for a while and could not have told anybody what you were feeling.

Here is what I think it was. When somebody says you are strong, they have just told you, kindly and without meaning to, that they are not worried about you. And the fourth time a thing happens to a person, nobody is worried about them anymore, and there is a loneliness inside that which is very difficult to describe without sounding ungrateful.

Practice does not reduce the weight

I have been around a long time and I will tell you what I have seen, plain.

People believe grief works like a callus. Do a hard thing enough times and the skin over it thickens, and the fourth one costs less than the first one did.

That is true of some things and it is not true of this. What you get with practice is not less pain. What you get is faster housekeeping. You know how to put the week in order, you know what to expect, you know to keep Thursday clear. That is skill and it looks like strength from the outside.

Underneath the skill, the fourth one weighs what the fourth one weighs.

You are not paying less for this because you have paid before, and knowing the shape of the week has never once made the week lighter. It is written in Ecclesiastes that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn, and it does not put a limit on how many times, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting in a kitchen with a woman on a Sunday evening.

And there is a second cost, which is the one your daughter cannot see. Each time, fewer people come. The first time there was a casserole and three phone calls. By the fourth, everybody knows you will handle it, so they leave you to handle it, which is exactly what you have always told them to do.

You have been left alone with this out of respect and not neglect, and being trusted to cope has never once been the same as being cared for. Ecclesiastes 3 names a time to mourn without asking whether the mourner has mourned before, and the Spirit of God has not left the kitchen.

A season, not a quota

Here is the passage and I want you to look at what it does not contain.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. (Ecclesiastes 3:4, King James Version)

A time to weep.

Now, that whole chapter is a list of seasons. Planting and plucking up. Breaking down and building up. Keeping silence and speaking. And the shape of the argument is that these come round, repeatedly, across a life, in turn.

There is no clause anywhere in it that says a time to weep, once taken, was the whole allocation.

Seasons return. That is the entire point of calling them seasons. Winter does not become less cold because you have been through fifty of them, and nobody has ever told a seventy year old that they should be better at January by now.

You have come round to a season and not used up an allowance, and the third and the fourth have never once been graded against the first. The written word lists the times as a turning wheel rather than a ration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set it up that way.

And I want to say something about the word resilient, which people have been handing you since about nineteen ninety four.

It is a compliment, and it is meant well, and it has a cost. It relocates the loss from the thing that happened to the person it happened to. Once you are resilient, the story stops being that you lost a house and starts being that you are admirable. And an admirable woman does not get comforted. She gets admired, which is a colder thing and does not do the job.

You were never required to be admirable about this, and thirty years of coping has never once earned you the right to be left alone in it. Ecclesiastes 3 gives a time to mourn to everybody without reference to their record, and the Spirit of God is the one making sure you get yours.