The Funeral I Watched on a Phone

Somebody propped it against the kettle, which is why the picture was at that angle, and why for the whole of it he was looking slightly up at his own family.

It was quarter to four in the morning where he was. He had made tea he did not drink. He had put on a shirt, which nobody would see and which he could not have explained to anyone, and he sat at his own kitchen table in a shirt at quarter to four watching a room three thousand miles away that smelled of things he could remember.

The connection dropped twice. The second time was during the part he most wanted.

His cousin was holding the phone for most of it and did it well, and at the graveside somebody took it and held it out at arm's length over the ground so he could see, and he watched his father's grave on a screen held above it by a man whose face he never saw.

Afterwards there was that thing that happens, where everybody there turns to each other and he turned to a kitchen.

Nobody in his town knew. He was at work at nine. Somebody asked how his weekend had been.

That was fourteen months ago, and here is the part that would tell you the most: it has never come up since. Not once. There was no funeral here, no card, no week off, no neighbor with a dish. The whole of it happened on a screen in a kitchen and then it simply stopped happening, and he has been walking around ever since with a grief that nobody in his daily life has any evidence for.

That is you, and there is no room anywhere that this took place in.

Two losses, and only one of them has been named

Let me name what actually happened, because I do not think anybody has, and I think you have been carrying it as one thing when it is two. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

The first is your father. That one is enormous and it is ordinary and every person reading this will one day have their own version of it, and it does not need me to explain it to you.

The second is the goodbye. You did not get one. Not the ordinary human one where a body is in a room and you are in the room with it and other people who loved him are standing close enough to touch. What you got instead was a rectangle, at an angle, propped against a kettle, dropping out twice. It is written, in Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Those are two losses. Grief is built to handle the first; it has been doing that for as long as there have been people. It has almost nothing to do with the second, because the second is new, and there is no ritual for it anywhere, and no phrase in the language, and nobody has ever said to you I am sorry you could not be there in the way people say I am sorry for your loss.

You are not making too much of this. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, Psalm 34:18, and it attaches no requirement anywhere that the breaking should have happened in an appropriate setting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen at quarter to four rather than leaving it a fine sentence about God.

Nothing here is going to tidy this

I want to say clearly what this page will not do, because you have probably had some of it done already. Scripture settles that in Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

I am not going to tell you why you could not get there. You know why. Whatever it was, whether it was papers or money or hours or a border or the speed of the thing itself, you have been over it more times than anybody, and there is no version of that examination that ends with you feeling better. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

I am not going to find a purpose in it. There may not be one, and Scripture is entirely willing to sit in a loss and never explain it. There is a whole psalm that ends on the word darkness with nothing resolved. Nobody edited it out and nobody appended a lesson to the bottom of it.

And I am not going to tell you he knew. I do not know what he knew, and neither does anybody who has said it to you.

What I can say is that God was in the room you could not get to and in the kitchen you were in, at the same time, at full strength, and did not have to divide Himself to do it. Scripture says if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, Psalm 139:9-10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes distance stop being the measurement it is in every other part of your life.

The shirt

There is one detail in this that I want to stop on, because you have been slightly embarrassed by it and you should not be. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

You put on a shirt.

At quarter to four, alone, for a camera pointed at nobody, in a kitchen, you got up and put on a proper shirt. You could not explain it then and you cannot now, and you have half filed it as something faintly ridiculous that you did in the middle of the night. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 34:18, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

It was not ridiculous. It was the only piece of the funeral that was available to you, and you performed it.

Everybody else that day had a whole architecture: the washing and the wrapping and the walking and the standing and the eating afterwards. You had one shirt. And you did it, and nobody saw, and it counted.

You honored your father the only way the night allowed. Scripture says honor thy father and thy mother, Exodus 20:12, and it does not attach a location to the commandment anywhere, and the Holy Spirit was in a kitchen at quarter to four with a man buttoning a shirt for nobody.

Nobody here has any evidence

And now the part that has done the quiet damage for fourteen months.

Where you live, there is no evidence that any of this happened. No procession went past. Nobody's mother made anything. The people who ask about your weekend are not being careless; they genuinely do not know, because there was nothing for them to see and you did not tell them.

So the grief has been running with no external support at all, which is a very different thing from grief that is merely private. Private grief is held in by a person. This one was never given a way out in the first place.

That is why it will not settle. Not because you are handling it badly.

You have not been asked to carry this without anybody. Scripture says weep with them that weep, Romans 12:15, and the instruction assumes somebody knows there is weeping going on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets one true sentence out of a man who has had fourteen months of being asked about his weekend.

Tell one person here. Not the story. One sentence: my father died last year and I could not get to the funeral. That is all. Let one human being in the town where you actually live hold one true fact.