One a Note of Grief - (ii)

It takes the preacher a few sentences before he begins to do what he must. First, more empathy.

"Our thoughts were with you continually," he writes, after referring to their own loss. And then, this rather strange sentence: "What a gloomy Sunday you must have had!"

The woman who sent the note to me explained that, because of the boy's fever and the risk of his fever spreading, the family had been under quarantine.

Somewhere in the fog of my earliest childhood memories, I see a sign that says "Quarantine," but that's all, just an image way back somewhere. Ninety years ago, both word and practice were routine. Imagine it this way: there is a sign on the door of house, a legal notice that makes you shiver with cold, maybe like this one. No one enters, no one leaves--save the dead.

"What a gloomy Sunday" refers to the fact that this loving, quarantined family, despite their grief, could not attend their own little boy's funeral. An entire century after the fact, that story is still carried along by descendant family members: the family could not attend the funeral.

I cannot imagine being Mom or Dad, locked up in the very house of death on that day, the house with the sign, while somewhere down the road the body of my child is being lowered into a small grave. Neither could Grandpa and Grandma Schaap imagine that particular pain, its immense isolation. An incredibly gloomy day it must have been.

And yet, only someone who’s shared the horrible experience of burying a child can give so much of the heart away. Grandpa and Grandma may well have written the same words had they not lost a child; but the fact that they had changes the way we read the solace in the words.

"This certainly is a shadow in your life which will never be entirely taken away on this side of death and the grave," Grandpa says. Today, I would love to ask him whether he would have written those same words thirty years later, when his many kids gave him dozens of grandkids. I'd like to ask him whether his own daughter's death eventually lost some of its jagged edges. I don't know that.

And then a stunning line. "But such is life," he writes. Such here is feels like a vague pronoun, its antecedent only assumed. Most readers would guess that he's suggesting we suffer agonies throughout our lives, hurts that, like open wounds, never really heal and therefore accompany us right through own final days: "Such is life."

Let me put the two lines together again: "This," he says, speaking of the death of their son, "certainly is a shadow in your life which will never be entirely taken away on this side of death and the grave. Such is life."

What he says feels very dark to me, but then I've never lost a child.



He goes on. "I have made mention of it [presumably, that "such is life"] time and time again in my sermons, . . ."

Grandpa baptized me, but I don't remember ever seeing him in a pulpit; he died when I was six years old. Through the years I've heard stories from people who knew him, and most everyone told me that he was a kind and loving man, no hellfire preacher.

But the way he explains his own preaching here makes him sound as if to him life was the valley of the shadow of death. "Time and time again," he says, he's preached that.

I can’t help but wonder how long it took him to get back into the pulpit after the death of his daughter. When he did, I wonder if, time and time again, he told his parishioners that "such is life."

And I wonder if the character of his preaching changed once he got to that new Lucas church, once he could hold his head up once more and keep his grief at bay.

It seems to me that today any preacher--even a young preacher, as Grandpa was--who tells his congregation, "over and over again" that "such is life" would wear out a welcome very soon.

But then, a five-year window of forgiveness extends, presumably, even to preachers.

"Such is life." Over and over again.
______________________ 

Tomorrow, more letter.