Life is Good

Sometimes Creation itself turns against us and lays on the very worst that life can bring: a dear parishioner from years ago is now there with the death of her son. A strong, athletic, vigorous, outdoors young man whom I baptized soon after his birth, he died sudden and unexpected of the flu the end of last week. Her one and only, she bore and raised him as a single mom, he was the light of her life. 

How will she go on? I am concerned, worried about her. I pray that she has a support group to cling to, especially in these first, unbearable days, and as Time goes on without him for ever.

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Yes, concerned, worried. There are events in life, and this loss can be one, so devastating that they can bring us down in despair no matter our faith or inner strength. Sean of the South, I don't always get around to reading his daily column, but I did read one earlier last week in which Sean said we need to talk about suicide, to have it on the table instead of treating it as an embarrassing untouchable. Sean knows well: he is a lifelong victim of his father's suicide when Sean was, as I recall, eleven years old. It's a loss from which it is impossible for Sean to recover, and that, fortunately for us his readers, he keeps writing about, not just in his ongoing grief into middle age, but as a service to others, so we realize how suicide destroys those who are left behind. As a priest and pastor I have officiated and attended the funerals of several suicides, and I've seen what it does to the survivors. A desolating realization for them is, "he didn't love me enough to bear his pain in life to be with me, instead of doing this to me, hurting me like this." There is no way back from that.

Of course, personal pain, physical, mental, anguish, grief, despair, the destroying pain of hopelessness, can rob us of clear thinking: a fact which is itself reason to, as Sean Dietrich wrote, keep suicide in the open as a discussable topic.  

Why am I going here this early dark Monday morning? Because it's heavily on my mind as I think of this young man's mom who is now left alone in life with a loss that I can imagine as being too much to go on with. Lord, have mercy: send strength, including the caring presence of others, even if there is as yet no place for comfort in her desolation. Amen.

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Monday into mid-February, 64°F in fog season. Magic mug of hot and black with one of my evil vices: a sandwich of Field's liver loaf. Publix may think they are too sophisticated to offer liverwurst on their cooler shelves, but I can always get it up the street at Grocery Outlet, or at Piggly Wiggly. Healthwise, along with the pork sausage and deer sausage that I love, It's probably the worst thing I can eat, and it certainly does not help with my need to lose ten pounds before my next doctor's appointment; but it's a lifelong favorite that, like oysters and mullet, starts eating on me as a craving if I avoid it too long. 

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For all the agony it can bring, life itself is good, a blessing worth living, as a song lyric sings about having loved someone, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world." I'm into my ninetieth year of it and still appreciating and enjoying. Thanks be to God, friends, acquaintances, and loved ones.

RSF&PTL

T89&c