On the morning of the funeral, she sat her children in five seats across the front row of the sanctuary, near the open casket. Mourners were already gathering in the foyer. The funeral director – a former Naval officer – was watching the clock. She would have just a few minutes. She sat down facing the kids and talked to them about the grain of wheat that must fall into the earth and die so that it can bear fruit. She promised them there would be fruit from their father’s life, fruit they could see.
Her oldest son had volunteered to help close the casket and to be a pallbearer. All the kids – ages 5 to 14 -‐-‐ had participated in choosing the songs for worship during the funeral. Were these signs of healthy and hopeful grief? Or did they signal shock and denial in the wake of so sudden a death?
Much was said during the service about the reasons we do not grieve as those who have no hope: the well-‐run race of a good and giving person, the lasting effects of loving relationships and, of course, heaven.
Heaven. Her head went there now in a way it never had before. Now, whenever she lost herself in the music and words of worship songs she would think: this is what he is doing, twenty-‐four seven. We’re doing it together, just in different places. This was not a poetic abstraction for her. As she pictured him there, the dim mental images of heaven that had sat hazily in her mind for years began to brighten.
The kids could talk about Daddy. They could laugh remembering Daddy. He was real to them.
Raised in church, they could also talk about God and heaven. But now, as they faced the rest of their earthly lives separated from their Dad, would “heavenly Father” be any more than a Sunday school phrase?
She could map out their days, do her best to model a healthy mix of sadness and hope, reassure them that they would be safe and cared for. She could tell them what she herself took as fact: God is good. Heaven is real. But she couldn’t write on their hearts.
Her oldest son had exploded in anger at God a few weeks after his father’s death. She let him yell. An odd sense of comfort had come over her. He wasn’t turning away from God. He was shouting in His face, as any young teen might do with a father. Painful as it was, it gave her hope.
The first glimmer that heaven could be a matter-‐of-‐fact reality for a child came later, unexpectedly, through her younger son.
Months after the funeral, when the visits had quieted and the calls and cards had subsided, she was in the kitchen, getting dinner ready. Her blue-‐eyed eight-‐year-‐old was at the counter, talking to her.
“Mommy,” he wanted to know, “did you and Daddy fight?”
“Sure, honey.
“Did you love each other?”
”Very much.”
“Well how come you fought?”
“People who are close do fight sometimes while they’re working out how to live together.”
He was quiet.
She put down the knife and potato she was holding and turned to face him across the counter.
“It was like this,” she said, positioning her index fingers about a foot apart from each other. “Daddy and I had a triangular marriage. I was here” and she poked the air with her left index finger. Daddy was there” and she poked the air with her right index finger. “God,” she said, “was here” and she used her right finger to place an imaginary point high above but centered between the Mommy and Daddy points.
“What we worked on was each of us getting closer to God.” She began to move the Mommy-‐Daddy points up the respective sides of the triangle, aiming steadily at the “God” point.
“As we each moved closer to God, -‐-‐ see? We would automatically get closer to each other.” She illustrated in the air the Mommy point moving slowly toward the God point, the Daddy point moving a little further up, the Mommy point gaining, the two leveling off across from one another for a moment, staying in motion, all three points getting closer with every move.
Her son studied the air picture for a moment.
“Right!” he said, beaming triumphantly the way he did when his favorite soccer player scored a goal. “And Daddy beat you.”
