We Could Meet Here

This morning I put on my skirt and jacket and wrapped up in a shawl and I went to a funeral.  I sat with Pat, Brandi and her parents  a few rows behind, glenn a row ahead, Dean and Trent across the aisle … friends scattered throughout the large church.  I watched connections between people being reaffirmed with each handshake, each hug, each grasp of hands or pat on the back – community re-establishing itself within the contrast of loss.

I listened to the Liturgy of Resurrection for the first time, and found words that were familiar, resassuring – and others that were foreign and disturbing.  I experienced waves of sorrow washing over me as I remembered other funerals … other deaths … other losses.

At one point, the priest spoke the familiar words:  “there is no greater loss than the loss of a child”.  We’d like to believe that … that there are losses that are greater and lesser.  But its not true.  Each loss is personal, distinct, unique.  Was the loss of my husband less to me than the loss of their son to his parents?  Was their loss greater than the loss of his brothers?  I do understand, though, the sorrow of unfilled potential – of a future that is suddenly cut short.  We see it all around us.  I picked up William Stafford’s The Darkness Around Us Is Deep and found the book opened naturally to this poem:

For A Lost Child

What happens is, the kind of snow that sweeps
Wyoming comes down while I’m asleep. Dawn
finds our sleeping bag but you are gone.
Nowhere now, you call through every storm,
a voice that wanders without a home.

Across bridges that used to find a shore
you pass, and along shadows of trees that fell
before you were born.  You are a memory
too strong to leave this world that slips away
even as its precious time goes on.

I glimpse you often, faithful to every country
we ever found, a bright shadow the sun
forgot one day. On a map of Spain
I find your note left from a trip that year
our family traveled: “Daddy, we could meet
here.”