I Missed The Funeral Because Of A Car

The service was at eleven and Keoni was leaving at half past nine because it was an hour and fifteen minutes away and he does not like to arrive anywhere in a hurry.

The car would not start.

He tried it for twenty minutes. He called two people. He called a cab company and there was nothing that could get him there in time from where he lives, and by the time he had worked all of that out it was twenty past ten and the thing was already over, in the sense that the thing was already impossible.

He sat down on the step at the front of his house in a suit and a tie at twenty past ten in the morning, and he stayed there.

His uncle was buried at eleven o'clock without him.

That was five months ago and it comes at him most days, and it does not come as grief. That is the part nobody around him has understood.

It comes as I wasn't there.

He has an aunt who has never once mentioned it, which he is grateful for and which also means it has never been said out loud by anybody. He has two cousins who were there and who talk about the day sometimes, easily, in front of him, and every time they do he says nothing and feels a specific cold thing go through him.

And he has stopped talking about his uncle at all. Which is the real cost, and it has gone almost unnoticed, because a man who is quiet about a death five months on looks like a man who is coping.

His cousin said in August, "You never talk about him."

And Keoni said, "Nothing much to say."

Which was not true. There is an enormous amount to say. He has just decided, somewhere he has not examined, that he forfeited the right to say it on a step at twenty past ten in the morning.

Two things are being carried and only one of them is grief

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you it did not matter that you did not get there. It mattered. You would have wanted to be, and it did not happen, and that is a real thing and I am not going to talk you out of it.

And I am not going to say a word about what was wrong with the car that morning. That was for somebody qualified to answer and it got answered later that week.

One plain thing first. Five months of a man not saying his uncle's name is a heavier load than it looks from outside, and grief carried alone can go somewhere much darker than quiet. If there are thoughts in it about not being here, tell a person today: your aunt, a cousin, a doctor, or the 988 crisis line for anyone in the United States. That is not a detour from this message. It is the most important line in it.

What I want to do is separate two things that have been carried as one bundle since April.

You have been carrying two things as one weight, and Scripture keeps a sorrow and a self accusation in entirely separate places. Psalm 56 has God telling a man's wanderings and putting his tears into a bottle, which is a record kept of the grief with nothing filed beside it about the man's failures, and the Spirit of God is what makes that separation possible five months on.

The first is that a man you loved died.

The second is that a man was not in a building at eleven o'clock on a particular Tuesday.

Those are not the same thing and they do not weigh the same, and they have been tied together for five months in a way that has made the first one impossible to talk about.

Now here is the verse, and I want you to look very carefully at who it is addressed to.

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.Isaiah 61:3

Them that mourn.

That is the whole qualification. Not them that attended. Not them that spoke well. Not them that got there on time or sat in the second row or carried anything.

Them that mourn.

There has been mourning since April, on a step and in a truck and at the sink, and it has gone on without a single one of the things that usually help a person do it, because a man took himself out of the company of mourners on a technicality.

You are among them that mourn, and Scripture makes the mourning itself the entire qualification for what God has appointed. It is written in Isaiah 61 that He appoints unto them that mourn in Zion, which names the mourners and nobody else and sets no attendance beside it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a man on a step in a suit.

You have not been disqualified from grieving him by a morning you did not choose. Isaiah 61 says beauty for ashes without one condition attached about how the ashes were come by, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that absence of a condition the loudest thing in the verse.

The step at twenty past ten was not a decision

Here is what I want to say about that morning, and it is short and it is factual.

You tried the car for twenty minutes. You called two people. You called a cab company. You worked the problem until the problem was over.

There is no version of that morning where you did more, and there is no point in it where you gave up on him.

What actually happened is that a machine failed at half past nine and there was not enough time between that and eleven o'clock. That is a schedule and a distance. It is arithmetic, and it was done by the clock, not by you.

And I want to say the other thing, because I think it is sitting underneath all of this.

You sat on that step in your suit until well after eleven.

You did not change. You did not go inside and take the tie off and get on with the day. You sat outside in a suit, at the time of the service, an hour and fifteen minutes away, and you stayed there for the length of it.

That is a man attending a funeral. You went. You just went from a step.

You were with him at eleven o'clock that morning, and no verse anywhere ties God's appointment for mourners to a room. Isaiah 61 puts the oil of joy against mourning and the garment of praise against a spirit of heaviness with no address given for either, and the Spirit of God is what makes a step at the front of a house as real a place as a building an hour away.

You have five months of grief that was never once illegitimate. It is written that He gives beauty for ashes to them that mourn, which is Isaiah 61 describing an exchange offered to the mourning as they are, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unspoken five months answerable to that rather than to a clock.