Across the Room at Every Funeral

Nine funerals. She has counted, and she is not proud of having counted, and she has counted anyway.

Their mother's, in 1988, which is where it started, or rather where it finished. Two uncles. A cousin. Their brother, in 2004, which was the worst. Four more since.

Nine times in a church hall with a cup of coffee and a paper plate, and nine times her sister across the room, perfectly civil, and once she came over and said something about the flowers.

Forty years.

She is eighty. Her sister is seventy-six and in good health and drives herself everywhere and has all her wits, which she mentions because people sometimes suggest that her sister may not be able to. Her sister is entirely able to. She simply has not, and there is no reason at all to think she is going to.

What happened is theirs and it stays theirs. What can be said is that it was in 1985, it lasted about three weeks, it concerned money and their mother, and one of them has never once said one word about it since.

And people say the thing. Her daughter said it about eight years ago. A woman at church says a version of it most years. You are both getting on. Somebody has to go first. You have to forgive her.

And it lands wrong every time, and she has never found the words for why.

Maybe you are waiting too. Maybe the person is right there at every family thing being perfectly pleasant. And you have been told the waiting is the problem, and nobody has ever asked what it is you are actually waiting for.

Sit down here with the cake. That is exactly where we start.

What the waiting is actually for

Let me say the plain thing, the way my grandmother would have, because nobody has named it and a thing cannot be put down while it is unnamed.

It was never really about the word sorry.

What a person waits forty years for is not an emotion from somebody else. It is an acknowledgment: that the three weeks happened, that they were what you remember, that you did not invent them or grow them in the telling, and that somebody with standing in the matter will say so out loud.

An apology is about her. An acknowledgment is about the record. And that is why nine funerals and a remark about the flowers have not touched it, because pleasantness is not acknowledgment and never was, and some part of you has known that since 1985.

You were never unreasonable to want a true record, and it is written that God has kept count and put the tears in His book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you unable to settle for a remark about flowers.

It is not coming, and that does not make it untrue

Now the hard part, plainly, because being gentle about this is what has cost you forty years.

It is not coming. Not at the next funeral, not if she is ill, not in a letter, not through her daughter. She is seventy-six and well and sharp and she has had forty years and nine occasions.

And I am not going to tell you she probably feels it and cannot find the words. I do not know that, and nobody who says it knows it either, and a maybe is exactly what keeps an old woman looking across a room at a tenth funeral.

Here is the half that nobody says. An apology that never comes does not make the three weeks untrue and it does not settle the matter in her favor. Silence is not an argument, and a thing that goes unacknowledged by the person who did it has not thereby been canceled or agreed to.

You are not waiting on the last word about this, and Psalm 37 says He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your justice as the noonday, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman where a record is actually held.

Where the acknowledgment already is

Here is the turn, and it is not a smaller thing offered in place of a bigger one.

The acknowledgment exists. It has existed since 1985, and it has never been in your sister's keeping, because she was never in a position to give it properly.

And one thing before the verse, because somebody has almost certainly joined this to something it is not joined to. Releasing her is not reconciling with her, and it is not trusting her, and nothing here asks you to sit anywhere different at the tenth funeral. You are free to finish the whole of this on your own at a kitchen table, and it is written that so far as it depends on you, you live peaceably with all, which is a phrase with a limit built into it, and the Holy Spirit is what steadies a woman doing this by herself.

God was in that house for all three weeks. He did not get a summary later. He does not hold a version assembled from what anybody said afterward, and there is not one day of it that He has quietly filed under a misunderstanding between two sisters who remember it differently.

And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends.Job 42:10

Read where that verse sits. It comes after God has spent a whole chapter telling those friends, out loud, in front of Job, that they were wrong and Job was right. The record was corrected first, by God, publicly. Only then does the verse about restoring turn up. You have a God who settles the record before He restores anything, and Job 42 is where He does it in the open, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old woman able to wait for that instead of for a sentence at a funeral.