holding them closely

Grief changes how we hold everything, and everyone, in our lives. It changes what it means to be alive.

Thestrels can only be seen by people who’ve seen death. -Luna Lovegood

When my grandmother died in 2013 in the waning days of October I found myself threading the loss into the story of All Saints’ Day, when we turn towards the last weeks of our church year with a faithful remembrance of those who have died.

The church year has official seasons, but I like to think of November through thanksgiving(ish) as the Season of All Saints’, where we connect the candles lit early in the month to the wholehearted gratitude that comes a few weeks later. It’s more of a pastoral mashup then anything that passes for orthodox, yet it works for me as a faithful framework for tying together grief and memory and hope, all of which tend to surface in this part of the year.

And that was how I understood it. I knew the script because I planned the liturgy, lit the candles, led the funerals, preached the All Saints’ sermon, and even shared it with my then four-year-old as we remembered Nana together. I thought I understood the story of All Saints’ perfectly well, and in a way I did, but apparently it wasn’t yet time for me to fully hold it in my heart.

My time came in 2020 and ’21 as I began to lose people before their time. These were people who had given my life meaning and shape and who I’d never imagined as more than a phone call away. It started with the death of Robert, the beloved youth leader who’d created a space of unconditional love and playfulness that inspired me to sense a vocation, and who continued as a companion to many of us as we clumsily navigated young adulthood.

Robert meant as much to my sister as he did to me, so we made the pilgrimage to Robert’s funeral, a year later in 2021, together.

I wish I’d known that would be the last time I’d see her as well.

When Catherine died suddenly that November, the season of All Saints’ went from being a moment of candlelit calm to an annual sandstorm of grief and memory. In the four years since Catherine’s death the tears have subsided but they have not stopped. And when they come, they still come heavy. It’s been enough years now that I know that’s just the deal, it’s not going to stop and I wouldn’t really want it to because it’s part of how I hold on to her.

I can see, though, that I live differently with death now that it’s touched me like this. Anyone with the gift of years will experience a moment where the illusion of permanence shatters, when we begin to live as much with the dead as we do with the living.

I have no idea if I was early or late to this, I just know that I’m there now.

It’s not always such a bad place, by the way. It’s the lived reality of All Saints’, moving out my head and settling into my heart, and it means seeing the world more tenderly. It means finding grace in the realization that I’ll be gone someday too, and trusting that’s both a burden released and a greater life waiting.

Life goes on, and life after Catherine is as full as ever. Our children are now teenagers navigating that part of life, and beginning to sense a future where they launch to the next big thing. Church work seems to get a bit richer with every chapter, though I wouldn’t say easier. And my pilgrimages to my sister’s city and friendship circle have l become a regular part of my life: meaning, it’s a part of how I am still very much alive.

I live with death every day now. Most days it’s a quick hello to Catherine as I greet the day, sometimes it’s heavy tears between services on a Sunday that falls on the anniversary of her passing. My heart holds the living and the dead together, family members and friends, faithful church folk who I’ve buried, and even the nonlinear but not-uncomfortable truth of my own finitude. Waves of heaviness sometimes, which somehow bring a sense of lightness and contentment in their wake.

That’s who I am now, though I’m hardly alone, and while it aches like you wouldn’t believe there’s grace to it as well. It has somehow made life fuller, painting the experiences of each day with the soft-bright amber hues of a sunset: something monumental happening beyond the horizon that colors everything we are now.

My heart broke, as part of me died the day that my sister’s heart stopped. But did it heal?

Four years later I can say with confidence: no, it did not. It didn’t suddenly get better. It didn’t become tough on the outside to protect a tender center (you’re thinking of a filet mignon) nor did it permanently turn light as a feather. Part of me died, that hasn’t changed, but what changed is that what I thought of as necrotic tissue may actually just be a different way of being alive, and keeping those we’ve lost within our living embrace.

Healing my heart is not, and was never, the point. It changed. I changed. I hold life differently, because I hold a few souls who I miss as close to me as the living. That’s always been a part of my vocation as a priest. For me, that’s now what it means to also be a brother.

There is something in that that is, mysteriously and unmistakably, alive.