She Called Me by Her Sister's Name

She called her Margaret on Tuesday, and Margaret has been dead since 1998.

It was said warmly. That is what makes it so hard to describe to anybody. There was no distress in it, no confusion on her face; she was pleased to see Margaret, and she squeezed her hand, and she said something about the garden being nice this year.

Her daughter said yes it is, and did not correct her.

She has learned not to correct her. It took about eight months to learn that and the eight months were expensive, because every correction produced about ninety seconds of genuine fear in a woman who then could not remember why she was frightened.

So now she goes twice a week and she is whoever is required.

She does the drive home in silence. Not crying, mostly. There is a particular junction about four minutes from the home where she often notices that she has been holding the wheel too tightly.

And nobody has said the word to her, because the word does not seem to be allowed. Her mother is alive. Her mother is fed, and warm, and reasonably content, and there are people in the world whose mothers are dead.

But something is gone. The person who knew her from the beginning, who held the whole record of her, who could have told her what she was like at four, is not in that room, and has not been for a while, and is never coming back to it.

That is you, and what you are carrying is a bereavement.

Three things I am not going to say

I am not going to tell you she is still in there somewhere, in the way people mean it when they say it. Sometimes something surfaces and sometimes it does not, and hanging your weeks on the hope of a lucid moment is a way of being disappointed on a schedule.

I am not going to tell you to treasure this time. That sentence is said by people who have never done a Tuesday and it makes an already exhausted person feel like a failure for finding it unbearable.

And I am not going to promise you that she will know you again. I do not know and nobody does, and I am not going to hand you an expectation that God has not given me to hand out.

What I will do is call the thing you are carrying by its right name.

You are not wrong to grieve somebody who is still breathing. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it never once specifies which kind of loss broke it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a car at that junction four minutes from the home.

The prayer of somebody watching themselves go

There is a line in Psalm 71 that most people read as a prayer for other people, and it is worth noticing who is actually praying it.

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.Psalm 71:9

That is a person praying about their own future. Someone who can feel it coming, who has watched what happens, and who is asking one specific thing: not to be dropped when they can no longer hold on themselves.

Read what the psalm assumes. It assumes God's holding does not depend on the person's capacity to hold back. That is the entire logic of the request, and the psalm is in Scripture without correction, which means the assumption is sound.

So here is what that means about a woman who called you Margaret on Tuesday.

She is not less held by God because she cannot locate you. Her faith, whatever it was, was never being maintained by her memory, and it is not maintained by her memory now. God's grip on her is not a function of her grip on anything.

She is not being cast off. Scripture says cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth, Psalm 71:9, and it is preserved as a prayer that God does not refuse, and the Holy Spirit is present in a room with a woman who cannot say His name any more.

The name for what you have

Let me give you the word, because you have not been allowing yourself one. It is written, in Psalm 71:9, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

What you are in is a grief that has no funeral, and it is common enough to have been studied, and everyone who researches it says the same thing: it is harder in some ways than a death, precisely because it does not end and there is no day when people bring food round. Scripture settles that in Psalm 71:9, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

You have lost your mother. You have also not lost your mother, and both are true at the same hour of the same Tuesday, and holding two opposite true things is exhausting in a way nobody who has not done it understands. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 71:9, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

And it renews. Every visit is a small fresh instance of it. Twice a week, for however long this goes on.

So no, you are not being self indulgent, and no, the fact that other people's mothers have died does not disqualify you from this. Grief is not a competition with a queue.

You are not required to hold two opposite truths without help. Scripture says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench, Isaiah 42:3, and it is a description of how God handles a person who is nearly out, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to be endlessly patient on your own.

Who visits you

Here is the practical thing, and it is the one I would actually change this week.

You have somebody to visit. She has somebody to visit her. There is no one visiting you. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 71:9, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

The drive home is the loneliest part of your week and it happens twice, and you do it in silence with your hands too tight on a wheel, and then you walk into your own house and do the evening.

That has to change, and it is not a luxury. Twice a week you are absorbing a fresh installment of a bereavement in a car on your own. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 71:9, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

One person. A friend, a sibling, somebody from a carers' group, who knows which days you go and who you can ring from the car park. Not for advice. So that the four minutes to the junction has a voice in it.

And there are carers' groups, in most places, of people doing exactly this, and being in a room with somebody who understands why she called me Margaret is a sentence with weight is worth more than a great deal of advice.

You are not meant to do the drive home alone. Scripture says two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor, Ecclesiastes 4:9, and it is a plain observation about the practical difference a second person makes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts somebody on the other end of a phone at half past four.