One a Note of Grief (iv)

If I've been coached on what happens to parents who suddenly lose a child, I learned what I know from a young father who lost a son in a farm accident. Two stories that young father told me have stuck with me, even though I wrote his story almost 30 years ago. One involves being on the tractor after the accident, after the funeral--how especially, he said, moving up and down the back 40 begs the mind to travel places far afield. During those times, this fiercely religious man told me he used to scream at God for what had happened. And then he said, "But so did King David. Read it yourself in the psalms."

The second lesson he gave me about grief involves answers that come too easily--specifically, answers that people offered him, like, "Jesus just wanted a little jewel for his crown." Answer like that made him angry, he said. "The best way to offer sympathy in a time like that is simply to be there," he told me. Silent presence, he taught me, is always best. Cheap answers are exactly that.

But Grandpa Schaap's silent presence wasn't possible when a boy named Nelson died of scarlet fever in Jenison, MI, in 1918. The grieving family was no more his parishioners, so he had to write. And he did, and I have in my hands a copy of that old letter. 

This is how Grandpa's remedy for their grief begins:

You may ask yourselves the question, "Why did the Lord give us the child so short a time, only to leave us in grief"? We answer, "God wants children as well as adults before His large white throne, and if you look at it like that, you would not dare to demand your child back to this sinful earth, and not to giving your child to praise and adore God better there than he would ever be able to do in this world. God sent out his angel to reap the sheaf that was ready, though you did not know it and God plucked him away so suddenly and unexpectedly as a flower that bloomed in the field.

My grandpa's catechism-like answer includes three metaphors in rapid fire.  The first is God's desire to people his court with young and old alike. He wanted the boy, Nelson, Grandpa says, for his own court, an answer that can, at best, makes God seem almost covetous. The second association is to ripe what: Nelson was simply ready to be harvested. The third equates the boy with a precious flower blooming.

An old truism claims that if you can give ten reasons for not doing something you should be doing, it likely means you probably don't have one good reason. Honestly, I don't want to criticize my grandfather's theology, nor may I properly question his propriety--after all, I have not lost a child. He did. Who on earth am I to judge? 

But I wonder if the quick succession of metaphors here, one after another (God's court, a wheat field, some lovely flower), doesn't frame and suggest his own dilemma. He tried, I might yet today, to throw words at the problem, to fill the emptiness with a tumble of ideas, one after another, hoping either that one of them might fit, or that the barrage itself could bring solace. I'm wondering if his saying so much doesn't suggest that he knows so little.

__________________ 

Tomorrow:  More from the letter.