The Year We Buried Him

I want to start where nobody starts, which is with the calendar.

When did the house stop.

And when I ask people that, there is often a pause, and then a month, and then very often a second sentence that arrives on its own and surprises the person saying it. That was when we lost him.

Those two facts have been in the same house for years and have never been in the same sentence.

Here is why I think that happens. Grief takes over the whole category of explanation. It is so large that it does not feel like a reason for something as small as a house. It feels like the weather. It feels like the thing everything else is happening inside, not a cause you would list.

And so the house sits there needing an explanation, and grief does not step forward to give one, because grief is not in the business of filing paperwork. A house is a record of what a loss cost, and it is not a verdict on the person still living in it. And into that gap steps a much smaller and much crueler answer, which is that you stopped caring, or you let things go, or you are not the person you were.

You are not the person you were. That part is true. But it is not the accusation you have been making of it.

Jesus wept

There is a verse that is famous for being short and is actually famous for something else.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35, King James Version)

He knew what He was about to do. That is what makes this verse impossible to explain away. He was minutes from calling Lazarus out of that tomb. He knew the ending, He knew it completely, and He stood outside a grave with people He loved and He cried.

Which means grief is not a failure of faith and it never has been. If it were, that verse would not exist, and it would certainly not exist in a scene where the outcome was already settled.

And notice what He does not do in that chapter. He does not tell Martha to be strong. He does not tell Mary that this is temporary, even though it is about to be. He lets the grief be the size it is, in real time, in front of everybody.

You are not carrying a grief that God is waiting for you to get over, and John 11:35 has never once put weeping on the wrong side of faith. It is written that He wept knowing exactly how the day would end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that permission real for somebody still inside a loss years later.

You have been treating a grief as though it were too large to count as a reason for anything. The word records the shortest verse in the Bible as a man crying at a grave, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a loss be named plainly as the cause of what came after it.

Grief is allowed to be the reason

Now let me say the thing that this whole article exists for.

Grief is allowed to be the reason the house is like this.

Not an excuse. A reason. The difference matters and shame will never make it for you. An excuse is something offered to avoid a fault. A reason is a true account of a cause. And the true account here is that a person died, and the part of you that did the ordinary maintenance of a life went with them for a long time, and that is normal and documented and human.

You have a reason and not an excuse, and grief has never once needed anybody's permission to be counted as a cause. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that distinction from collapsing in a person's hands, and John 11:35 puts weeping in the record with no timetable attached to it.

Everybody would grant that in the first month. Everybody grants it at the funeral. Very few people know that it is still granted in the fourth year, and almost nobody says so out loud to somebody who needs it.

So let me be the one who does. It is the fourth year and the grief is still a legitimate reason.

You were never neglecting your home, and a loss has never once stopped being a cause at the point when other people stopped asking about it. John 11:35 puts weeping in the record without a timeline attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a true cause standing when everybody else has moved along.

So tonight we are going to put the two facts in one sentence, on paper, once.

You are permitted to write his name beside this house tonight, and writing it has never once been disrespectful to him. It is written that Jesus wept at a grave He was about to open, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person finally says the two true things in the same breath.

Write down the month he died

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Write down the month. The month he died, or she died.

Underneath it, write what happened to your days after that. Not what you failed to do. What happened. Could not cook. Slept in the chair. Went to work and came home and sat. Whatever it was.

Then read them together.

Nothing gets cleaned tonight. That is not what tonight is for.

You are able to see the loss and the house in one place tonight, and seeing them has never once required the grief to be finished first. John 11:35 records a weeping with no schedule on it at all, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a pen and a name on a piece of paper.