“For
a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.” Psalm 90:4
When my
father died, the poet Scott Cairns sent me a poem he’d written at the death of
his own father. Like no other poem I
know, it offered consolation—and still does.
Countless times I’ve sent it on to others who’ve lost parents or
friends. It’s titled “Words for a
Father,” and it begins with “and,” as if we’re probably overhearing some ideas
that have been brewing in our heads for quite some time.
“And this is the
consolation: that the world
doesn't end, that
the world one day opens up
into something
better. And that we
one day open up into
something far better.”
He’s talking about afterlife, of course—our
visions of the eternal, of heaven. None
of us know a thing about what the afterlife will look like, but our differing
views (streets paved with gold, good fishing, no more wind) all share the same basic
conviction: there, things will be
better. That much for sure: things will be better.
Then he visits a vision of things,
narrating carefully one possible sense of dying:
Maybe like
this: one morning you finally wake
to a light you
recognize as the light you've wanted
every morning that
has come before. And the air
has some light thing
in it that you've always hoped
the air might have.
And One is there to welcome you
whose face you've
looked for during all the best and worst
times of your life.
He takes you to himself
and holds you close
until you fully wake.
There’s no Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
only a sweet light and a single, strangely familiar face, a maternal God whose
welcome is a blessed, wordless calm.
And then the lines that seem most
memorable to me—or certainly were in
those days following my father’s dying.
And it seems you've
only just awakened, but you turn
and there we are,
the rest of us, arriving just behind you.
We'll go the rest of
the way together.
What hurt me most at my father’s death was the sense of
his being gone, alone, the rest of us seated in the church he’d attended his
whole life, all of us, his entire family.
To the terror of that emptiness, Scott’s poem is sweet and grand relief,
profiling eternity by promising us all—my father and his included—that a
thousand years in God’s sight are like nothing at all. Nothing.
We’ll be there soon ourselves.
That, is comfort.
1 comment:
Tear-provoking, but, thank you.
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