It Was My Father's Car

It has one hundred and ninety one thousand miles on it and Regan is going to keep it.

That is not really in question. What is in question is why she cannot talk about it, and why every conversation about it ends with her leaving the room to do something in the kitchen.

Her father died two years ago in March. The car came to her because nobody else wanted it and because she said, in a quiet moment at that time, that she would take it.

Here is what is in that car right now.

A pair of glasses in the door pocket, which are his and which she has not moved. A parking receipt from a hospital, dated eleven days before he died. A small dent on the rear quarter that he did in a garden center in 2019 and that he was funny about for a year.

And the driver's seat, which is set where he set it, and which she has never adjusted, and she is four inches shorter than he was, and she drives it that way.

Now. There is a real conversation to be had about that car and it is a practical one. What it costs. What it will cost. Whether a woman with two children needs a vehicle with that many miles on it as her only one.

Regan cannot get anywhere near that conversation, and she knows she cannot, and she has been calling herself sentimental about it for two years.

She is not being sentimental. Something more specific is going on and it deserves naming properly.

She is afraid that if the car goes, he goes a bit further away.

Not in a way she believes theologically. She would tell you plainly that her father is not in a car. But there is a difference between what a person believes and what a person's hands know, and her hands know that the glasses in that door pocket are the last thing he touched that she can touch.

Her brother said in the spring, "You know you don't have to keep it."

And Regan said, "I know."

And he said, "I mean it. Nobody's asking you to."

And she said, "I know," and went to put the kettle on.

Two conversations that have been stuck together

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

I am not going to tell you to keep the car and I am not going to tell you to let it go. I have not seen it, I do not know what it costs you, and grief is not a thing anybody should be advised about by a stranger.

And I am not going to tell you your father would want you to be practical. People say that and they mean well and it is not usable, because it puts words in the mouth of somebody who cannot correct them.

What I want to do is separate two things.

There is a practical decision about a vehicle: miles, cost, safety, two children. That decision has numbers in it, most of which a mechanic can supply in one phone call, and it can be made in an afternoon by a competent woman, and Regan is one.

And there is a grief about a father that is two and a half years old and that is nowhere near finished, and should not be, and has no numbers in it at all.

Those two got stuck together in March two years ago, and every time she reaches for the first one she gets the second one, and nobody can make a decision about mileage while holding a pair of glasses.

You are not being sentimental, and Scripture takes a person's grief seriously enough to describe God keeping a physical record of it. It is written that He puts our tears into His bottle and asks are they not in His book, which is Psalm 56 treating sorrow as a thing worth collecting rather than a thing to be got past, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a real fact about two and a half years.

Now here is the verse, and it is one of the strangest and most tender images anywhere.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Three things in that sentence and all of them are about keeping.

Thou tellest my wanderings. Tellest there means counts. Every one of them, numbered.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle. A physical container. Something you can hold. David asks for his sorrow to be collected into an object.

Are they not in thy book? Written down. Recorded. Kept.

And what that establishes is enormous for a woman who has been keeping a pair of glasses in a door pocket for two and a half years.

The keeping is already being done. And it is not being done by a car, and it is not being done by her, and it does not depend on either of them.

You have not been the one holding on to him, and the passage puts the collecting and the recording in God's hands rather than in anybody's possessions. Psalm 56 has the tears in His bottle and the wanderings in His book, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a keeping no decision about a vehicle can reach.

Take the glasses out first

Here is the practical thing, and it comes before any decision about the car, and it is the whole of what this message asks.

Take the glasses out.

Not to throw away. Take them into the house and put them somewhere you will see them. A shelf, a windowsill, the drawer in the kitchen where the good scissors live.

And take the receipt out, and put it wherever you keep papers that matter.

And do that before one more conversation about mileage happens anywhere.

Because here is what happens once they are out of that car. The car becomes a car.

Right now it is a reliquary. It contains him. And nobody, in the history of the world, has ever made a sound decision about the running costs of a reliquary.

Once the glasses are on a shelf in the house, the vehicle in the driveway is a hundred and ninety one thousand miles of metal with a dent in the back, and Regan is entirely capable of thinking clearly about a hundred and ninety one thousand miles of metal.

She may still keep it. That is a completely legitimate outcome and it might be the right one. But it would be a decision rather than an inability.

You have permission to take him out of the car before you think about the car, and no verse anywhere ties a person's memory to an object. Psalm 56 puts the keeping in a bottle and a book that God holds, and the Spirit of God is what makes moving a pair of glasses an act of trust rather than a letting go.

And I want to say the thing about the seat, because it is the detail that will stay with me.

Four inches. She drives four inches too far back, every day, for two and a half years, because moving the seat would mean the last position he set was gone.

That is not foolish. That is a daughter, and I would not take it from her, and I am not going to.

But it is also her, every single day, sitting slightly wrong, and I think somebody should say out loud that she is allowed to be comfortable.

You were never keeping him by being uncomfortable, and Scripture puts the record of a person's sorrow with God rather than in what they are willing to endure. It is written that He telleth my wanderings and putteth my tears in His bottle, which is a keeping that costs the mourner nothing, and His Spirit is what makes that permission arrive as kindness.