I had the privilege yesterday of conducting funeral services for a longtime member of the church. She was a straightforward woman. Often, when I visited her as she slowly died of cancer, she would describe her pain to me, ending with the convicting words, ‘but I can still sit here and talk to you.’
Yesterday was a day marked by heavy rain and thunderstorms. The water table is so close to the surface in Jackson County that, even after the rain stopped, the grave continued to fill with water from beneath. It was decided that the family would leave the funeral home at 11 a.m., head to the church for lunch, and we would drive back to the funeral home at 12:30 p.m., drive the 45 minutes to the gravesite and conduct the brief graveside service.
There was something striking about the graveside, but I don’t know what it was. There was a mock site set up, since the grave was full of water. The actual site was covered over with sections of green turf laid sideways over the grave so as not to shock the mourners with the deep hole full of water. We gathered in an adjacent tent, blue, anchored deep against the strong winds. There was blue carpet laid down to prevent us getting wet and muddy. To no avail. Even the blue cloth covers of the chairs were soaked with the rain that had fallen a few hours ago, as one of the daughters discovered to her dismay when she sat on one. As I read Scripture, the wind whipped the tent panels so loudly that I’m sure some had trouble hearing.
We read, prayed. I stood quietly as the seven children of the deceased gathered as family around their mother, tears in each of their eyes. This would be their last family meeting. They aren’t close, most of them.
As the family filed to their cars, some laughing and telling stories, some still weeping, I began to talk to the funeral director who drove me to the gravesite. I would need to find another ride home. He needed to stay and perform some duties.
I looked down at his Italian leather shoes. Beautiful shoes. Or should have been. They were covered in mud. Not caked mud, but spots of mud. Spots from the heel to the toe of each shoe, and on his pants cuffs. He looked at my own shoes, a $25 pair of imitation leather dress shoes purchased at a discount store maybe 7 years ago. There was hardly any mud on mine. We joked that I had done my devotions that morning, so I walked above the mud. We laughed. It wasn’t out of place.
And that’s what was striking, I think, about the gravesite. It should have been something more, perhaps. But it was quite ordinary. Remarkable in its unremarkability. The whole of human emotion, from tears to anger to laughter, were there, just as they were inside the tiny gas station visible from the grave. People there likely wondered who was being buried as they filled their 32 ounce Polar Mugs with soda. The service ended, and there, at the edge of the tent, love and relationship and sadness and grief and joy, life, stood to greet the mourners.
This from Henri Nouwen: “Joy and sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to the soberness of the barren trees. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he will have to leave you again… This intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”
