We Got The Keys The Month After The Funeral

Her chair went in the van with everything else.

Not deliberately. Your brother put it in because it was there and it had to go somewhere, and it came across town with the boxes and the lamps and the thing with the broken leg that you keep meaning to fix.

And it is in the front room now, by the window, and you have not sat in it.

Five weeks between the funeral and the keys. Five weeks, which is not long enough for anything, and in that gap you did the paperwork and the packing and rang the people who had to be rung and you did all of it competently, which everybody noticed and several people mentioned.

And the day you moved in, your sister stood in the kitchen and said, she would have loved this.

And you agreed with her and carried on with what you were doing, and something went sideways in you that has not come back straight since.

Because the two things are in the same month. And a woman whose mother has just died and who is glad about a kitchen does not know what to do with either of those, so she does the packing and the competence, and the gladness waits outside in the yard.

Two things in one month

Let me say plainly what I think has been going on since the move, because I suspect nobody has named it and it has been getting worse for want of naming.

A decision got made in this house that being glad about it would be a kind of disloyalty.

Not consciously. If somebody put it to you in those words you would say no, of course not, she would have wanted us to be happy, and you would mean it.

You have a loyalty running in you that nobody asked for, and being glad in the same month as a funeral has never once taken anything away from the woman who died. Ecclesiastes 9 says eat thy bread with joy in a chapter that stares straight at the grave, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put those two on the same page.

And underneath, in the part of a person that does not use sentences, a rule got made in about the second week, and the rule says: not yet. Not while it is this recent. Not in the same month.

You have a rule in you that nobody made out loud, and gladness in the same month as a grief has never once been a betrayal of anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that front room with a chair by the window, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 9 that we are to eat our bread with joy and drink our wine with a merry heart.

And I want to point at the chair, because the chair is the whole thing in one object.

It is in your house. It came with the boxes. And it has been walked past about four hundred times in five weeks without anybody sitting down in it once, and the reason could not be explained to a soul, and the reason is that sitting in it would be both things at the same time.

It would be your mother, and it would be your front room. Grief and gladness in the same object at the same moment, and something in you has decided those cannot be held together.

You have been keeping two true things apart, and holding a loss and a good thing at once has never once been beyond what a person can do. Ecclesiastes 9 puts the eating and the joy together in a book that has spent ten chapters staring at death, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw no contradiction in that.

Eat thy bread with joy

Here is the verse, and where it comes from is what makes it usable.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7, King James Version)

Now, Ecclesiastes is the book that looks hardest at death. It says the living know that they shall die. It says one event happens to the righteous and the wicked. It does not flinch and it does not tidy anything.

And in the middle of the chapter that says all that, without changing the subject, it says: go thy way, eat thy bread with joy.

That is not written by somebody who has forgotten about death. It is written by a man who has been looking directly at it for the whole book, and who then tells the reader to go and eat their supper gladly.

You have permission from a book that has been staring at a grave, and gladness offered in that context has never once been a thing that ignored anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who placed it exactly there, and the written word puts the merry heart right in the middle of the chapter about everybody dying.

And look at the reason attached: for God now accepteth thy works.

Now. Present tense. Not later, not after a decent interval, not when the year is up.

The permission in that verse is dated now, in a chapter about death, to a reader who has been thinking about mortality for nine chapters, and there is no waiting period anywhere in it.

You are permitted now rather than later, and no interval anywhere has ever once been required before a person was allowed to eat their bread with joy. Ecclesiastes 9 dates the acceptance to the present, and the Spirit of God is the one who did not put a season on it.