Brief thoughts on the stench of death.

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.