I Have Not Cried Yet

It has been five months and she has not cried once.

She organized the funeral. She chose the hymns and she rang the cousins and she stood at the front and read the thing she had written, and her voice did not go once, and afterwards three separate people told her how well she had done.

She has been through the house. She has done the paperwork, which took eleven weeks and involved four institutions who each wanted the same certificate. She has given away the coats.

She has not cried.

Her sister cried at the graveside, properly, the kind that has to be held up. Her sister cries now, still, in the middle of a Tuesday, and rings her afterwards embarrassed about it.

And she says the right things to her sister and puts the phone down and stands in her own kitchen and feels roughly what she felt before the call.

In a car park, about two months in, she thought a sentence she has not told anybody: there must be something missing in me.

Under that one, quieter and worse: maybe I did not love her as much as I thought I did.

That is you, and neither of those sentences is true.

Three things, before anything else

The first. Not crying is one of the ordinary ways a human being grieves, and it is common enough that people who work with the bereaved for a living expect it and are not alarmed by it. You are not rare and you are not cold. Scripture settles that in John 11:35, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

The second. Nothing on this page is going to try to make you cry. There is a kind of writing that goes hunting for a reader's tears as though tears were the proof the piece worked, and I am not doing that to you. If they come they come. They are not the goal here and they are not the evidence of anything.

The third. Nothing here is going to tell you where you should be by five months. Grief has no schedule and every published one has hurt more people than it helped.

You are not broken for grieving in a shape nobody warned you about. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not stipulate a visible break, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is near to a woman standing in a kitchen feeling almost nothing.

The shortest verse and what is actually in it

There is a verse everybody knows for the wrong reason, which is that it is short enough to memorize.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

Look at where it sits, because the placement is the whole thing.

Jesus is at Lazarus's tomb. He knows what is about to happen. He has said so out loud, minutes earlier, to Martha. There is no uncertainty in Him about the outcome at all, and the resurrection is perhaps four minutes away.

And He weeps anyway.

That tells you something people usually miss. His tears were not caused by hopelessness, because He was not hopeless. They were caused by the death of somebody He loved, standing in front of the fact of it, with those who loved him.

Now hold that next to your own situation, and notice the thing that matters for you. Grief and tears are not the same substance. Jesus wept while entirely certain. You are not weeping while entirely broken. Neither one is the measure of the other, and Scripture never once makes crying the test.

You are not disqualified from mourning by a dry face. Scripture says Jesus wept, John 11:35, and it records His tears without ever making them the price of anybody else's grief, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter rather than the one who checks whether comfort was needed loudly enough.

What the organizing was

Five months of it. The hymns, the cousins, four institutions, eleven weeks, the coats.

You have read that as evidence of coldness, because you got it done and you did not fall apart while doing it. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in John 11:35, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

It was not coldness. It was love, doing the only thing that was available to it.

Somebody had to make sure your mother's death was handled properly, and you did that, thoroughly, at some cost, for months, and every single one of those phone calls was an act of love that produced no tears because that is not what phone calls produce.

There is a further thing, and it is worth naming because it explains the timing. A person who is organizing cannot fully grieve, because organizing requires the exact faculty that grief switches off. You have been doing the practical work of loving her for five months. It is entirely possible that nothing has come yet because there has been no room in which it could.

You did not fail to love her. Scripture says charity beareth all things, endureth all things, 1 Corinthians 13:7, and beareth is a load-carrying word rather than a feeling word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly what eleven weeks of paperwork was.

Your sister is not the standard

She cries and you do not, and you have quietly made her the measurement. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in John 11:35, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

She is not the measurement. She is one person grieving in her own way, and she rings you afterwards embarrassed about it, which should tell you that she is not confident she is doing it right either.

Two sisters, the same mother, two entirely different nervous systems, two different roles in the family, and one of them did the paperwork. There is no version of grief that is the correct one and the other people are approximating.

And notice what you have been doing for her. You say the right things and you take the calls and you never once make her feel foolish. That is what a person who loved their mother does with their mother's other daughter.

You are not measured against anybody. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it makes each person's load their own rather than a comparison, and the Holy Spirit does not grade a woman's grief against her sister's.