good grief

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

“Except he visit them with death and with terror…they will not remember him.” Helaman 12:3

The Raising of Lazarus by Jean Jouvenet

This photo captures so much heartbreak.

Last week was Sister Patricia T. Holland’s funeral. If you haven’t had a chance to watch it, you should do so. I was moved by the stories her family shared about her goodness and quiet consecration. But what still has a hold on my feelings is the palpable grief that was etched on the face of her husband, as seen in this poignant photograph.

Love and death have since been much on my mind.

Death as I’m thinking of it here is not just big D death. It’s the end of something that matters dearly to us. A relationship. An opportunity. A dream. Grief IS good. But it is also the sharpest knife that cuts in the deepest places. Sometimes we recover. Sometimes not, or at least for a long, long time. What we do know is that all good things come to an end. Including THE end. I think this is what we see in the shattered eyes of someone like Brother Holland who KNOWS life doesn’t end at death. The pain still radiates. The veil can still feel like a wall.

For all our talk of increasing life expectancy and “80 is the new 60,” death still holds sway. None of us will escape it. Apparently even our death date is already calendared. (D&C 122:9)

At 57, I try not to think about how much time I have left. But math is math. My mortal ending is inevitable. If I’m lucky, maybe 35-40 years. Possibly less. An unanswerable question, right?

But the real question isn’t how much longer, is it?

It’s how well.

Or as the late poet Mary Oliver asked in her most-quoted poem, The Summer Day, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Not quoted nearly as often is Oliver’s question just proceeding this one: “Doesn’t everyone die at last, and too soon?”

My answer to that question is another question: “What is my work, and what is yours?”

To love.

To love fiercely, whole-heartedly, without restraint or withholding. To love with all the risk of what loving might cost us. To know this sometimes brutal world we call home for all that is wrong with it and still to love and love and love again.

Or to quote Emily, in my favorite line from my favorite play, Our Town:

“Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quietened down up here. People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill. We all know how it is... and then time... and sunny days... and rainy days... n' snow... We're all glad they're in a beautiful place and we're coming up here ourselves when our fit's over. Now there are some things we all know but we don't takem' out and look at'm very often.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and ain't even the stars... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.”

― Thornton Wilder

Death IS terrifying. Loss of a loved one as they slip through the dark curtain breaks the strongest heart.

I think that’s the point.

Love like there’s no tomorrow. There may not be one.

To a Dying Girl

How quickly must she go?
She calls dark swans from mirrors everywhere:
From halls and porticos, from pools of air.
How quickly must she know?
They wander through the fathoms of her eye,
Waning southerly until their cry
Is gone where she must go.
How quickly does the cloudfire streak the sky,
Tremble on the peaks, then cool and die?
She moves like evening into night,
Forgetful as swans forget their flight
Or spring the fragile snow,
So quickly she must go.

-Clinton F. Larson

“The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.”
Russell M. Nelson

I am peaches in September
And corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives
I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard
And the cool beneath their shade
Where the boys have left their beer cans
I am weeds between the graves.