The Question of the Cake

The fourteenth of March is in eleven days and nobody in the house has said the word yet.

It would have been her seventieth. There was going to be a thing; there had been talk about a room somewhere, back when talk about rooms was a normal thing to be doing.

She died in October.

And now there is a Tuesday coming with a date on it and a question inside the date that nobody will ask out loud, and it is this: is there a cake.

If there is a cake it feels grotesque. If there is not a cake it feels like the first year they let her go quietly.

Her daughter has thought about all of it. Going to the grave. Not going to the grave, because they went at Christmas and it was awful. Making the thing she used to make. Not making it. Saying something at teatime. Ignoring it entirely and getting through the day, which is what her father wants and has not said and she knows anyway.

She has been thinking about it since about the eleventh of February.

And under all of the logistics is the thing that is actually happening, which is that she has taken on the job of getting the day right, on behalf of five people, in a family where nobody has ever discussed any of this.

She wakes at about four. She is not crying at four. She is planning.

That is you, and nobody handed you this job.

What I am not going to do

I am not going to tell you whether to have the cake. There is no correct answer and anybody who gives you one confidently has not lost anybody.

I am not going to tell you that she would have wanted anything. You do not know and neither do I, and that sentence has been used to push more grieving people into doing things they could not face than almost any other.

And I am not going to promise you that the first one is the worst. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the second is worse, because the second is when everybody else has moved on. Nobody can hand you a schedule for this and the ones who try mean well.

You are not doing this wrong. 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 nearness is not conditional on the day going smoothly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is closest at four in the morning while you are planning.

The psalm that does not tidy itself up

There is a line in Psalm 6 that has never been made into anything, because it cannot be.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.Psalm 6:6

Read what that is. It is exaggerated, it is undignified, it is a grown adult saying that the bed is wet through, and it is in Scripture, unedited, with no correction attached to it and no verse afterwards telling him to get a grip.

That is worth more than almost anything else I could give you today, because it tells you what God is prepared to have on record about how His people grieve.

There is nothing in the Bible that requires grief to be tasteful. There is no instruction anywhere about doing a first birthday with dignity. That expectation is entirely from us, and it lands hardest on whoever in the family is the organiser.

And notice how the psalm ends, three verses later: the Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping. Not the voice of his composure. The voice of his weeping. That is what was heard.

You are not required to be dignified in this. Scripture says all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears, Psalm 6:6, and God preserved that sentence rather than tidying it, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in that kitchen hoping the fourteenth goes well.

Nobody appointed you

Five people, one Tuesday, and you have been running it since the eleventh of February. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 6:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

Who asked you?

Nobody did, and that is not a comfort, it is the actual problem. In families where nothing is discussed, the job of managing an unbearable day falls to whoever cannot tolerate it being managed badly, and that is almost always the person who is grieving most actively.

You have been carrying five people's discomfort as though preventing it were possible. It is not. Somebody will cry on that Tuesday whatever you arrange, and somebody will be angry, and your father will want it not mentioned, and none of that is a failure of planning. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 6:6, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

The four in the morning planning is not preparation. It is an attempt to control an uncontrollable day, and it is taking the sleep you will need on the day itself.

You are not the person responsible for how five people feel on the fourteenth. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it hands each person their own rather than piling them on the organiser, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody put down a job nobody actually assigned.

Say the word out loud

Here is the thing that will change that day more than any decision about a cake.

Somebody has to say it. Eleven days out, in an ordinary voice, at an ordinary moment: mum's birthday is on the fourteenth. What do we want to do.

That is all. Not a plan. A question, asked out loud, in a family that does not do this.

Two things happen when you do. The date stops being a thing everybody is privately dreading in isolation, which is the state that makes a day unbearable. And the responsibility stops being yours alone, because once it has been said in a room, it belongs to the room.

Your father may say he would rather not mark it. That is a legitimate answer and it is his grief, and if he says it out loud you will know it, instead of guessing it at four in the morning for four weeks.

You are not the only one who is dreading it. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and it takes a burden being named before anybody can get under it with you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a family into a conversation they have avoided for months.