More than a few years ago now, we attended the funeral of an aunt on a day that was as cold as any that winter, so cold the graveside service was not held. The crowd of folks attending the funeral at the church was predominantly elderly, so the funeral director, the preacher, the children (I'm not sure who makes a decision like that) decided simply to forgo the litany over the grave.
Most of the funeral's attendees drove out to the cemetery anyway, led traditionally by the hearse, and the pallbearers nearly froze carrying the casket to the gravesite. The rest of us stayed in the phlanx of cars that had cracked along slowly on snowy streets all the way out to the west edge of town.
A sister of the deceased decided she simply wouldn't sit there in a warm car, so she walked out to the casket and took a flower from a bouquet that must have been rapidly wilting in the sub-zero temperatures, an undertaking that was accomplished only with the help of one of her children. She took a flower from the bundle, stood there for one treasured moment, then was kindly helped back to her car. She simply had to say goodbye.
That picture was one of the most precious I saw during all 0f that year, or even the last decade, a memory that comes back to me unbidden whenever wind-chilled temperatures flatten out at the bottom of the thermometer. Even the deathly cold wouldn't stop that her from gathering a flower, from saying goodbye to her sister.
Fifteen years ago that happened, but any winter day at the cemetery reminds me of that woman's loving pilgrimage.
It's March 10, that time in the calendar year when it's greatly human of us to imagine warm temps on sunny days that promise the end of winter. But invariably it happens--winter won't go down without a tussle. Down here in the basement, the furnace is running heavily this morning, reminding me that we're not done paying to heat the place. It hasn't felt like an awful winter, but our heating bills suggest otherwise.
Everything we do, every last event, every passing day and night, is colored right now by the abject suffering in the Ukraine and the impossibilities that insanity has carried into our lives. Even a junkie like me has trouble turning on the news. It's all so cold, so dark. In eastern Europe it's winter too.
There's no snow outside my windows, but the cold is persistent enough to remind me, this morning, of a grief-stricken sister who braved frigid temps one morning and walked out through the cold in a small town cemetery, just to be sure that she honored the memory of a sister she greatly loved.
She took a flower, stood for a moment, and was helped back to her car.
On cold days especially, I can't help but give thanks for the good and blessed stories.
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