My wife and I arrived to pick our daughter up from cheerleading practice but, since we were early, decided to use the extra time to take our dog for a walk. Looking at the fields where two hundred girls aged five to thirteen were dancing, tumbling, and flying into the air, I saw the evening twilight had made the grass beneath their feet greener than I knew it really was and had shaded the sky above into a deep, sumptuous blue—as if the end of day was bringing out its best for last.
“The days are already getting shorter,” Annie said as Rosie left messages for her canine kind on a signpost. “Hard to believe summer’s almost over.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The time flew by.”
Letting Rosie pull us along, we crossed the street and followed her as she sniffed her way into the town’s graveyard. I had been there several times before, usually looking for homeless clients seeking shelter beneath its trees. Since I worked for the town, some of the names on the gravestones were familiar—names of old families that had lived here since the Revolution, or people I’d met in old age now sleeping the big sleep.
“Ah,” I said, pointing out a headstone. “There’s Louise. Remember her? Always donated food to my pantry every month.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“A year already. I went to her wake.” Looking at the grave marker, I could see the ground in front of it was slightly disturbed, as if the new arrival was still settling in.
“Norman told me they have no room for caskets anymore,” I said, remembering what the local funeral director told me when I was looking for a place to bury my father. “They take only cremated remains now.”
“Takes up less room.”
“Still have to shell out for a headstone, though. Those things are expensive.”
As we meandered among the dead, I saw time and weather had eroded many names on the graves into ghostly stencils while the engraving on others was defiantly deep, crisp, and clean. Some had foot markers indicating military service or were decorated with flowers by those who still remembered the loved ones beneath our feet. Many markers were also unkempt, tilted, or stained with moss, making me wonder if no one cared about them or if time had consumed those who once had. Probably a mixture of both. Then we walked into the section where infants were buried.
“Look,” Annie said, pointing to a tiny stone. “That child only lived a day.”
“This one lasted just a month.”
“Remember when Natalie was that small?” Annie said. “We checked to make sure she was still breathing at night.”
Looking at the statue of an angel spreading its wings over a youngster who died in 1912, I remembered how I worried during my daughter’s earliest and most helpless days. As someone once said, having a child is “to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,” which means you are vulnerable to the worst pain imaginable – losing them. When you’re a parent, those thoughts occasionally take up residence in your head.
Standing by that child’s grave, I remembered when I was a young seminarian and watched a hospital chaplain counseling a couple who’d just learned their toddler had died. Their grief was heartbreaking, and now, years later, I realize the only thing that could’ve comforted them would’ve been for them to get their child back—which, as we all know, just doesn’t happen. Now a parent myself, I know nothing less will do—and that scares me.
I hope for life after death, that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and restore our loved ones to us. What people don’t talk about, however, is just how painful that kind of hope truly is. It does not allow for closure or retreat into tragic resignation about how all things end, that “everything happens for a reason,” or singing some paean to the “Circle of Life.” Such thinking asks us to think of the death of our loved ones as a settled matter and, knowing that, somehow find the strength to live on.
We may indeed get on with our lives, but the loss will always be an open wound that never truly heals—because Christian hope won’t let it. That hurts because it asks us to believe in the insane expectation that “what has been lost will be given back—that the dead will actually rise, that nothing is truly lost.” Such a faith is much riskier than tragic resignation or philosophical detachment because it leaves us exposed and vulnerable, asking us to long for something that seems impossible.
For the parents of that child below me, their greatest fears were realized. But, as that baby’s grave glowed in the twilight with shrill whistles and girlish cheers echoing around me, I suddenly felt like I was standing on the liminal edge between two worlds—between all that is seen and unseen—and somehow knew, even in this place of sorrow, joy would always find a way to make its presence known. Perhaps, in the fading light of day I was hearing the faintest whisper of a fantastic promise—that, in the end, life will save the best for last. I hope so.
Because nothing less will do.