August 3, 2024
Dear Sons,
Closure. We think it’s a good thing. You know, like when you or your brother step outside, and try to provide air conditioning to the whole neighborhood, and I encourage you from inside the house to quickly find closure by shutting the front door! The same is true emotionally—when you’re trying to regulate the temperature in a climate-controlled space, gaping holes in the exterior boundary create drafts where what’s supposed to stay inside leaks out and what’s supposed to stay outside sneaks in, and the thermostat loses track of whether we’re trying to cool off or warm up. No one knows how to dress for such an environment and everyone ends up uncomfortable. What is proper healthy ventilation, without frying the furnace or the condenser?
Common experience and Biblical wisdom urges us to find closure to life’s loose ends–those parts of us that are left open, like wounds, debts, grievances, errors, and so on. But when it comes to those emotional gaps caused by a rip in our family fabric, it can be hard to know how, where, and when closure ought to happen. Too late is to linger, wallow, and fester. Too soon is to deny, suppress, and displace. Both ways are disrespectful of the issue at hand, if not damaging to us, and generally unhelpful as they circumvent the optimal window for healthy processing and short-circuit the ideal opportunity for healing, forgiveness, and restoration. Look at it just directly enough to deal with it, not so intently as to obsess over it, or so dismissively as to be oblivious to it. Hold it just tightly enough to manage it, not so tightly as to kill it, or so loosely to be killed by it. Something significant enough to register when it’s left open is something worth addressing, because it’s not nothing; but anything is never everything.
In the case of death, I don’t know how long it takes for emotional closure of those surviving to catch up to the physical closure of the departed. I don’t think anyone knows. Some people appear to take too long, other people appear to not take long enough. But I don’t think it ever really does come to a close. The door that’s trying to close is a revolving door, so just as soon as you get one train of thought or stream of feeling tucked away inside, another is rushing out into the elements.
The funeral provides, or perhaps imposes, a timeline for saying final good-byes and paying last respects. Different cultures have a variety of customs around those final days above ground, when the dead body is hanging around, but nobody knows quite what to do. Some traditions, like the Irish wake, seem intent on stalling, inviting loved ones to mingle about in the presence of the body. Others, like Eastern sky burial or towers of silence, seem committed to expediting the removal of the unclean body by exposing it to elevated places where the birds can have at it. In one way or another, all our traditions are trying to help a mourning community move along, neither too fast nor too slow. Pros and cons.
When there’s a body to be buried, you can watch the interment, and have that venerable vignette, a visceral view of their embalmed shell being lowered into the ground. It can serve as a reminder to stop looking for your loved one around the corner or out the window. “Daddy’s not coming back” (see 4Him’s song, Where there is faith). But you also have to wrestle with the association of that grave plot as their new permanent address, as though you could locate them at a specific crosshairs of grid coordinates. This then becomes a blinking light on the subconscious map of all the places you could be besides here. And if you’re not there, would it mean you don’t care? I’ve never visited my Dad’s grave, or my grandparents’. Not that I wouldn’t, and not that I wouldn’t revere the surreal moment standing at that site, but I’ve never felt the need to go “visit them.” Some do, however, and they make a point to honor that pilgrimage, talk to the air around the tombstone, and tend to the coffin’s curb appeal. I understand the allure and sacred regard for one’s final resting place. But I don’t feel like landscaping a landfill would help me with closure. Their physical remains are decomposing. We seal them in an ornate box bed and etch an epitaph in stone as a head board to help us imagine them resting in peace, undisturbed forever. But the true peace is spiritual, and meanwhile, the inevitable breakdown of matter is already in progress. Alas, so too, it seems, is the disintegration of our psychological selves, and our relational bonds that were contingent on their existence.
Cremation accelerates the same natural process and skips ahead to that final dust-to-dust state. Even the act of scattering ashes, whether on the wind, or over the water, or in the ground, offers another type of venerable vignette–a visceral view of your loved one disappearing. But in this case, there’s nowhere to go look, no place to visit. They’re nowhere now, or they’re everywhere–the particles of their remains indiscriminately mixed with all the other drops of water and grains of sand. Mommy’s not coming back. But where do you go to find a reminder, where do you look for some tangible memento of her? Some Koreans will turn their loved one’s ashes into colorful death beads to store in a vase.
Our Biblical worldview allows us to see the body for what it is and see through it for what it isn’t. Some have tried to make human life all about the body, either tightening it up as disciplined as possible, or loosening it in every way imaginable. Others have tried to make life have nothing to do with the body, assuming it is to be ejected as soon as your spirit can escape it. Is it only disposable, and nothing that happens to it matters? Is it the only thing durable, and elongating its usefulness through whatever technological means possible is our only hope?
Comparatively, as Christians, we have the lowest and highest view of the body simultaneously. We understand that spirit is not reducible to matter, and the body, while inextricably linked with the mind, for example, cannot contain the soul. Invisible things persist and transcend what can be seen. This gives us a certain reverent disregard for what “they” can do to our physical form, which is already wasting away, while we put a premium on the condition of our mind and heart, from which spring the waters of life. But we don’t disregard the body as garbage. God created the world and everything in it, and it was good. Even the dirt was good, and Spirit-animated dirtlings are very good. Its corrupted, contaminated version may be falling apart as long as humanity has been falling away, but as God’s kingdom comes and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven, we begin to anticipate the new heavens and new earth, and what it might be like for all things to be made new.
It’s reasonable to imagine some form of what we experience as physical bodies will be reconstituted, resurrected, and redeemed, even if only like the notes of a musical score (ink on paper) give rise to the song on the airwaves (played by instruments of wood and steel), or the sketch of the cathedral (charcoal and canvas) manifests in three dimensions down the street (stone and wood). Perhaps our embodied existence is the precursory prototype for something more––not less––than what we’ve experienced. To get us there, matter matters, energy enables, spirit sustains. Flesh and spirit grapple for the upper hand in satiating immediate drives and sacrificing for eternal dividends. In the gyroscopic whirl, we approach equilibrium, experienced as soundness of mind and body, capable of upward and outward growth, even as our inner growth gets narrower and deeper. Sometimes we need more of one than the other, and this life affords us plenty of trial and error, practice with feedback, and live-and-learn lessons when we don’t yet have learn-and-live wisdom. All this is perhaps our flight simulator training for when we will be issued our new suits with which to thrive in the new environment. Who knows, really?
The part that makes helpful sense in the meantime is regarding this fragile little life as precious yet partial, important yet instrumental, valuable yet vaporous, sacred yet supplemental. It seems most useful to think of this existence as we know it here and now not as an end in itself, which so often comes to an early and tragic end, but as a meaningful means to a higher end. We may lose parts of our body, and parts of our family, but nothing that God isn’t intending to restore and re-combobulate––multiplying blessings beyond our wildest expectations for those who do not make for ourselves idols out of created stuff, …but altars.
Such altars are meant for both repentance and rejoicing, penitence and praise, lament and laughter, sacrifice and salvation, remembrance and restoration, funerals and weddings, births and baptisms. These sacraments and spiritual disciplines, historically accompanied by more sensory experiences, all matter because they expose the overlap of heaven and earth. These touch points between physical and spiritual are our portal to the realm where God is weaving some super-spatial (infinite), trans-temporal (eternal), multi-dimensional (meta-physical) life. I don’t know why you have to enter Narnia through the back of wardrobe, or Hogwarts through a brick wall, or the upside down through a tree, but that’s the way God set up the game. We might as well ask why there are country mansions, train stations, and fenced off meadows in the first place.
Give us this day, our daily bread loan
Though man does not live by bread alone
Our lives wrapped up in flesh and bone
Words hit harder than sticks and stones
Molecular boundaries, to each his own
Spiritual extension, none live alone
From dust to dust, creation groans
For when we’ll know as we are known
Heart, soul, mind, and strength, to wander are prone
Becoming whole and holy, not born full grown
God’s Spirit in flesh, Christ’s way has shone
We as one will gather ’round His throne.
In our case, Mom wanted to be cremated and for us to scatter her ashes somewhere that would require us to take an adventurous trip together. But before that step, Kathy wanted to donate her body to science, letting the scientific research and medical education community benefit from her cadaver before they retired it. They told us it could take six months to a year before we would receive her cremains. That was not going to help with closure.
That is the thought that occurred to me in the lonely silence of her hospital room the morning she died. After everyone else had left, I stayed in the room waiting for them to come take her body away. This really was it, she really was gone, and she really was about to disappear. The nervous sobs shook my body. In an impulsive moment of clarity, if you could call it that, I pulled out my pocket knife and snipped a lock of her hair. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do with it, but that overwhelming sense of “last chance” came over me. Mom’s last haircut. I put the clipping in a ziplock baggy and brought it home. I didn’t want us to have to wait till next summer to lay her (or some representative part of her) to rest––in our hearts and minds as much as in the earth.
Not long after the memorial service, in the spirit and rhythm of a private graveside service, the three of us walked down our Woods Trail to the first bench that faces the live oak tree. We read the prayer for scattering ashes from Every Moment Holy, and sprinkled her hair along the base of the tree behind the rocks that were already piled upon the roots. Ashes scattered? Barely. Body buried? Hardly. Some symbolic gesture grasping at some semblance of closure? Perhaps. But that door’s going to keep swinging around, and we’ll probably need to keep coming back.
Later in the summer, we returned to the same bench with a new offering in hand. While storing away some of the cards and keepsake memorabilia from recent months, I came across your baby pictures and two ziplock baggies containing a lock of hair from your fist haircuts. I couldn’t imagine what else would happen with this little childhood souvenir, or who else would ever be interested in seeing the evidence that in fact you had hair as a baby, at least without finding it mostly creepy. So, this seemed as good a time as any to do something with it, to at least dispose of it in some creative way. What if that scrapbook box in Mom and I’s closet had sat there gathering dust, as it were, for such a time as this. I proposed we take these tributary trimmings down the trail and add them to the memorial mulch around our family tree. A token of your “hair-itage,” if you will.
Remember the first time I had to shave Mom’s head because the chemotherapy was causing her hair to fall out? I shaved all of our heads that day as a gesture of our collective disruption and mutual dedication. In similar solidarity, I didn’t want to miss out on this moment either, so, I grabbed some clippings from my own recent haircut, and we set out down the sidewalk on that warm first night of August, each with our token clippings. It may sound strange to someone not emotionally connected, but I wondered if this would choreograph an appropriate offering, symbolizing sacrificing something of ourselves as we acknowledge Mom’s departure from our midst. If nothing else, I thought this might provide another cycle of reflection and commemoration, approaching closure. It might have slipped past quietly, but I also selected this night to share the audio files of your mother’s parting blessing to you. When Mom was in hospice care, when it seemed the end could be near, she, with the help of her dear friend, Mrs. P., held the phone near her face so she could capture any passing thoughts or possible last words in that still quiet moment. Mom’s body was struggling and the medicine was making her feel loopy, but while her voice was frail, her sentiment was strong as she encouraged you by describing her love for you and her desires for your life. Another revolution of the door, another cycle of attempted closure swings open to fresh tears.
The tears were mixed. Sweet and bitter. Grieving, but grateful. Happy, but heavy. The dwindling summer means fall and a new school year is almost here. Time’s relentless march forces us to bid farewell to things we enjoyed and ushers us forward into the next responsibility. Does it feel too soon? Or too late? Either way, before moving on, I wanted to give you that chance to hear the echo of your mother’s voice. It was hard hearing her again, but so good. That’s why I read “A Liturgy for Embracing Both Joy and Sorrow” from Every Moment Holy out loud as we sat otherwise quietly on that bench and stared at the stalwart tree silhouetted against the moonlit creek bed. “Breathe out sorrow. Breathe in joy.” The revolving door spins, the garden gate creaks as it swings back again.
That bench was bolted down in the concrete and that tree’s aging branches keep surviving our ice storms. But that moment felt like it was going to vanish as fast as the falling strands of hair through our fingers, like the petals of a flower sprinkled on grave, like dust in the wind, …all forms of sand through an hourglass. But we were depositing this love offering not because we supposed it would last, but because we needed the memory to last — a tender and solemn memory at this limestone altar, our Ephraim Road ebenezer, our sanctuary for lament in worship tucked away in the Woods at Brushy Creek. In everything that ever grows near that place, it will also be a signpost of the coming resurrection to jubilee. We will experience ultimate closure in the re-opening of death to life.
Think about that: your very first haircut, Mom’s very last haircut, and my most recent one. The cycle of life carries on: birth, death, and the live-long days in between. The womb, the tomb, and every room in the middle. The cradle, the coffin, the couches and cars along the way. In and out, the door keeps spinning. What was it we were saying good-bye to, and what were we greeting afresh?
When you and your brother saw your preserved baby hair, you were amazed at how light, smooth, and “luscious” it was. Mom’s hair, though once dark, full, and flowing as well, had become thin and gray and bristly, when it was growing at all. The relative purity and innocence of childhood gives way to the harsh edges and uneven, sometimes barren terrain of adulthood. Perhaps by adding your own donation that night, you were acknowledging that a part of you was dying as well. There would be no going back to when life was simple and unbroken, and family was a coherent, closed circle, when Mom was right down the hall or popping up on your phone with a kissy heart emoji. You are having to grow up in ways that feel rushed according to modern statistics and contemporary sensibilities. But what you gave up, and what you deposited at that site was a part of you, not all of you. It was a contribution, not a total commitment, as the pig put it, while trying to explain to the chicken the difference of impact on them when the farmer was in the mood to have bacon and eggs for breakfast.
You walked away from that scene. You didn’t die. You walked back up the slight hill, down the trail––we all did, and stepped right back through our front door. But it wasn’t you who returned. Not you in the same way. Every time we venture beyond the threshold of the familiar and comfortable, we give something of ourselves away, and we gain something in return. How that plays out depends on whether the God-centered core of our being was brought more into alignment by what was given and what was taken. We mourn death, absence, and pain. But we do not fear the damage to our body or the departure of Mom’s. Rather, we revere the one who holds life and death in His hands, and intends to shape our lives, just like he has with Mom’s, into His image, the likeness of his Son. Some clay is taken away at shocking times, some is folded back in in surprising places. The Potter’s wheel of providence has decreed that the world keeps spinning, and we keep trusting Him in the best of times and the worst of times. There will be:
A time to depart, a time to return.
A time in the shade to shed the scaly hide of entitlement, resentment, and discontentment, and a time in the sun to unfold the chrysalis-soaked wings of opportunity, gratitude, and satisfaction.
A time to sacrifice something precious to us, and a time to receive the most precious gift from the most significant Other.
A time to cry, and let others cry, and a time to wipe away tears and share your extra handkerchief.
A time to hate that death takes from us and can take from us still, and a time to love what life gave and still offers to give.
A time to listen, let go, and consider, and a time to create, grab hold, and commit.
A time to sit still and let the breeze bring the message, and a time to get moving and slice through the wind with a message of your own.
A time to remember the soft warm safety of your Mother’s embrace, and a time to chase away every dragon who would steal such moments from others.A time to harken back to the echo of your Mother’s sweet voice and let it recharge your “soul-er” battery, and a time to charge ahead through the sonic boom when your life surpasses even her highest hopes.
Scattering your baby hair was like a rite of passage. A passage through a door –– as if we ought not to have been seeking closure by turning around backwards to shove the heavy door shut so we can be tucked away safely inside, but passage––a thoroughfare of momentum so brave and enlightened by the other side of the cavernous room, that when we push open those new possibilities, we might just find that the old door was naturally blown shut behind us. You will treasure in your hearts the blessing to have had such a woman to call Mom––so funny and fierce, such compassion and conviction, who got so much pleasure from your greatness and gave so much protection over your weakness. You will honor the past by building on it, not holding onto it or hiding in it. As you grow in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and man, you will eliminate any need or desire to coddle the version of you that could be a weak, needy, and naive toddler who only understands when he gets his way. We will cultivate a childlike faith, not a childish entitlement, that depends on God and trusts Him to provide all good things necessary for life and Godliness. We will crucify the old self, and we will put childish ways behind us, and move on to maturity in the Spirit. We will cherish the nurturing maternal presence in our lives, and we will hold it in tension as we channel the catalytic paternal force. We have to be tender enough to be still, sit on a bench and let our tears water a tree that’s older than our grandparents. And we have to be tough enough to climb down from its branches and set out on the next adventure. Benches and trails.
In fact, in less than 36 hours from that nighttime excursion, you and your brother embarked on an epic expedition. The “(B)ROad trip,” as I call it. As I write this, you are heading east to check in on some camp friends in Kentucky and Tennessee. Someone had to go see about a girl, I guess, or at least feel what the open road could be like when so many good things await you beyond the horizon. If this CRV voyage is like any other odyssey (see what I did there?), there will be moments of sheer ecstasy and stretches of drudgery. The horizon glimmers with possibility, some of which you’ll realize you never would have experienced if you wouldn’t have pursued, and others you’ll come to learn were disappointing and elusive, only revealing yet another horizon, another summit, another oasis mirage beyond itself. Such is life, for it is always trying to run away from death, only to discover it was chasing it.
Here again is where the Christian understanding helps. We are not trapped in an endless cycle of consciousness lost and regained. Nor are we doomed to the one-wick life that flickers for a bit and always flames out into nothingness. Rather, our lives experience real death with real sorrow, for such are part of the journey toward real life with real joy. We do not seek premature or misdirected closure after the death of a loved one. Memory and legacy are integral to our interconnected, chronologically-structured selves, but they are not the basis of our hope, and they are not sufficient for consolation. We are not left with only backward-looking appreciation. Even Christ’s death on the cross is not meant to motivate us only by remembering the past, but by opening up a new and better future, starting now, anticipating his return when that future grace will arrive in full. Not all water on the horizon is mirage. There is in fact an oasis in Eden that is overtaking the desert. Every bench we sit on, and every trail we travel, will soon enough find itself on Paradise’s map. Maybe then we’ll find closure. Or we’ll find closure is overrated in light of the open-ended abundance promised to those who waited on the Lord.
Love, Dad