shadows of grief

The service at the crematorium in early afternoon kind of straddled the whole of the day.

It somehow casts its shadow both forward and back. At least it feels like that. It feels like being under a cloud all the day.

I'd done the preparation through the night: which I often prefer to do. It always takes a good few hours to learn from God his word for the occasion and to work up the address. And it's best to have those hours all in a one-er: and I find as well it often works quite well to do it late (last thing) at night. No one's around and there aren't any calls and my mind is quite often in a fairly creative mode.

But because it's late at night, I always like to check it through when morning comes. So the first part of the day today was spent on simply putting final touches to it all. Feeling my way once again right into the heart of the grief. I like to speak from very much 'inside' the grief and pain, instead of being some unaffected, cool-as-ice observer looking on.

And that's the reason why, I guess, there's always such a shadow cast right back across the morning hours before the service is being held.

I try to get on with other things - and to some extent manage to do so. But the shadow of that grief is always there: and makes it hard.

The same as well in the aftermath. I worked some more on the coming Sunday's services. But the 'shadow' was there and that makes it slow and hard.

The service itself saw over a hundred people gathered there. A shame really that it was the smaller 'Cloister' chapel that they'd chosen, since it only seats some 60 or so at most.

Maybe they'd thought there wouldn't be that many there. Though for an active young man of just 41, with a whole range of hobbies and so many folk who'd been touched by his life, it was hardly very likely that the numbers would be small.

Perhaps it was just that his widow preferred it small: sort of wanted to hide away and just be by herself. I don't know. Desperately hard for her. And for them all.

It's hard to tell in a service like that just what is getting through. So many folk with little or no ostensible faith. The 'shadow' of death is somehow all too real when that's the situation.

There seems to be an all-pervasive heaviness, a certain sort of emptiness, which simply echoes round and round the bleak despair and hopelessness attached to all the grief.

And so, as I say, it's hard to know how much gets through. But I've long since learned to leave that to the Lord. He gave the words to say: I'm sure of that. It's up to him just how those words are used.

But I pray there was some comfort and some help.