This afternoon, I attended the wake for the young woman I wrote about in my post on Saturday. Her husband, Greg, met me at the funeral parlor at around 1:30. As you can imagine, he was pretty broken up. Family and friends slowly filled the funeral home as people kept saying that Jennifer was “too young to die” or “why would God give her such a terrible disease.”
I tried my best during the period I had to lead the assembled in prayer (and through a little homily) to dispel the notion that our God is a mean God. When we are grief stricken and heart broken, the easy thing to do is to blame God for the tears. Instead of looking to our God for comfort, we tend to go to the blame game and God is the only culprit.
We want our loved ones near us and when they die, a void is left in our lives. But it is God who provides comfort. It is God who pulls us close to Him during these times of grief and gives us the blessed reminder of His love through Christ. When our lives end, we believe firmly in the promise of God that He will call us to Him for all eternity. Faith in Him, borne of God, is what leads us home.
As a child of God, born of water and of Spirit, our prayer and hope is that Jennifer is with her Lord.
I left the funeral home a little bit after 3 and arrived home a half hour later. For the rest of the afternoon, I was shaken by the sadness in that room. I’ve done numerous funerals in my short ministry, but today the tears and the sadness really got to me. It is times like this when I am feeling really blue that I wish I was married just so I can tell someone and let everything I am feeling out. It is just so hard to explain to friends how I am feeling when I face situations like this; as someone who is supposed to keep it altogether, how can I tell a friend just how bad I feel?
So, I don’t. Instead, I collapse into a shell, not responding to phone calls, emails, or text messages. I end up sitting down and sometimes crying.
It was a little bit before 7 when my phone rang. It was Greg. He asked me if I would come to tonight’s wake to “do what I did this afternoon.” I got ready and headed off twenty minutes later.
When I arrived at the funeral home, the place was packed. The line to get into the room stretched down the hallway. Jennifer touched the lives of many people and tonight, her friends and acquaintances wanted to pay their final respects to her. At around 8:15, the funeral director asked me to come forward to lead the overflow crowd in prayer. I spoke the briefest of homilies, of which it will lead into my sermon tomorrow morning where I will speak of the resurrection.
At 9, when I snaked my way through the now-smaller crowd, Greg’s father tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to come back to his son’s house. We arrived at the house around 9:30. Greg pulled me aside, offered me a glass of water (he was surprised when I took a beer instead), and asked me some questions about the funeral. I explained that since we were not going to a church for the funeral service, we would do most of the service in the funeral home, about 2/3rds. The final third is the committal, which takes place at grave side.
When I finished my beer around 10, I figured it was time for me go. I went up to Greg, who was speaking with his best friend and best man at his wedding, Evan, and said, “Good night.” Greg, looking lost, responded with the same “Good night.” But he added a short story.
A couple of months ago, he and Jennifer made plans to spend a couple of days in New York City. They only lived in Nyack, but they felt it would be fun to spend time in the city at a hotel and take in the sights for just a day or two.
One of the sights they wanted to take in was tonight’s Bon Jovi concert at the Garden. He pulled the tickets from his shirt pocket and broke down crying. He said he forgot all about them until he came home tonight. He went into his dresser drawer looking for a clean shirt; the tickets were in the envelope that lined the bottom of the drawer. After telling me the story and starting to cry, he collapsed into my arms and we both stumbled down to the floor. First we crashed into the side of a corner table near the couch, which caused the lamp on the table to fall to the floor and shatter. My back was a little worse for wear, but I was OK as I left.
I arrived home at around 10:40 with my back hurting a lot. It got rather uncomfortable driving down Route 9W. When I got home and went upstairs to change, I noticed that pieces of the shattered lamp were in my hair. Also, I realized that my left rib cage is hurting and aching. I think I will have a heck of bruise there tomorrow morning.
However, a bruise on my rib cage is not what is bothering me tonight.
It is that I feel so downright crappy.