Be Grateful For The Portion Received
Write about death, my young editor told me. It will be part of a series we’re planning. You know about death, she said. And I do. I know it well. People I have loved the most are gone on that dark and mysterious journey.
Friends who have brightened and warmed my life with their strength and generosity when anguish and uncertainty assailed me are no more.
Sure, I know about death.
When October turns the maple tree in my front yard into a towering wall of gold, I stand under it and cry for the man who planted it there - the young husband who came into my life when death had ended a troubled first marriage. I was almost 40 years old and my children were on their way into adulthood and lives of their own.
When the nights turn chilly and I pull up the quilt at the foot of the bed, I bury my face in a pillow and try not to ache for the old hands that lovingly stitched it. My mother, wise and joyful and tough. She had promised me that the women in our family live forever.
“We can’t get out of anything by dying,” she once told me at a time of seemingly insoluble problems. “The women in our family live forever.”
And then, at the age of 83 years, she walked to her bed in the little house in Alford, Fla., and let an ailing heart take her away. Alone. It was not the “forever” she had promised me, but she thought it was time. She had made a jelly cake and cooked a pot of turnip greens, knowing that we would be arriving for her funeral.
Sure, I know about death.
But understanding it and coping with it - ah, how do you do that? This I know: You don’t stop remembering and missing.
A scrap of music, a laugh, a funny story, the flash of a cardinal wing at the window … they all remind you, and you long to get to the people you love and tell them about it.
When pain and loneliness hit, as they inevitably do, you long for the listening faces you knew, the strong arms that held you. You have to learn sooner or later that you can bear troubles without them - but happiness is harder. You hurt to share it.
The most believable and somehow comforting words I know on the subject came from a revered minister, Dr. Vernon S. Broyles, who faced death in the loss of his first wife and felt compelled to speak of it to the congregation that loved them both and grieved with him.
“Sorrow,” he said, “is not an intruder any more than joy is an intruder. It is part of the threads out of which life is woven, and we can accept it on that basis. It is part of life, as much as any other thing is a part of life … one of those ties that bind all mankind together. Sorrow is something we choose when we elect to love, the other side of the coin of joy.
“Sorrow is a priceless possession, causing us to remember with a sadness that interprets the meaning of love. Surrender is the key to comfort and love. You have to admit that you have lost that which you loved, instead of giving in to the urge to pretend that it isn’t so. … Where we cannot find the way, it means everything to believe that God does know the way.”
And to the question, “Why should it happen to me?” Dr. Broyles said God’s answer is, “Why should it not happen to you? It happened to the son of God himself, and it happens sooner or later to everybody else in the world. Find your place in the sufferings of men. You have company there, the company of all mankind.”
Dr. Broyles taught me another thing about the acceptance of a loved one’s death - and that is to say a prayer of thanksgiving for having had them in life, even as you grieve over their death. It is easy to be thankful when you have shared lives that have been lived with gladness, with love and with generous giving.
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