I’ve been reading this week’s Gospel lesson attempting to
prepare a sermon for All Saints Sunday. I desperately want to talk about the
promise and hope of resurrection because that is what I am to proclaim as a
Christian. I find that proclamation to be difficult today because I find myself
to be stuck in the tomb. There’s a stench that
comes with being sealed in a tomb. There’s the physical stench, the decomposing and decay of a
human body that once was. But I think there’s another stench; the social
stench.
I’ve come to know experiences with death this year that I
wish I didn’t. I saw my father, a man who lived life large and
unapologetically, wither away to almost a skeleton covered with skin. The man
who was larger than life died a death that whittled him down to skin and bones.
That death took place on June 3, 2015. Today is the eve of All Hallow’s Eve.
Almost five months have passed, and I realize that in some ways, I carry the
social stench of my father’s death. I still grieve. My lens on how I see death
and resurrection has been forever altered. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s
not.
What is this social stench? I’m not entirely sure, but I can
try to describe parts of it. I know that I will never be the same person after
the evening of June 3, 2015. That morning, I had a father. Later that evening,
I didn’t. There is a boundary line drawn on that day that cannot be erased on
this side of the eschaton. I know that my mom’s life, my brother’s life, and my
life will never be the same. I become emotional when I talk about my dad and
the things that he enjoyed. I become emotional whenever I think about calling
him. I become emotional with the realization that he never got the experience
of being a grandparent. Simply put, I become emotional.
This is not to say that I have been emotional twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. But that grief is beautiful and complicated and
painful, and it sneaks up on me when I least expect. Sometimes it happens when
I sit by myself. Sometimes it happens when I’m in conversation with someone.
Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night and I stare at the ceiling.
It is there.
Sometimes the grief is overwhelming, I feel like I am in the
clutches of grief and it will swallow me whole, devouring every sense of my
being. There are other times where it is a slight pang of sadness, a gentle
little wave that comes in and pools around my feet. Sometimes, I don’t even
notice that it’s there. Sometimes grief feels like the stench of death is oozing out of my pores. That stench feels like the Ruth
to my Naomi, and not in a good way.
I think the social stench has impacted how I am in
relationship with those around me. Relationships that I had with friends that
entailed long conversations into the night are now silent. Sometimes I don’t
know what to say; sometimes they don’t know what to say. We stare at each other
in silence across an abyss of experience and sadness. Perhaps that chasm will close as
time progresses. Perhaps it won’t?
With death and decay comes something that continues to
surprise me: compost. New relationships have grown out of the social stench of
death. New growth has come in conversations where I was previously too meek to
contribute. But honestly, I still struggle. I still have days where I seem to
move through the five stages of grief multiple times a day. I still feel this
ache in my heart where an emptiness now resides.
But that’s the thing about
compost... something will grow.
