Yet.

*

Written by Margie Boswell Miller.

Of late, I am touched by loss: The mother of a childhood friend and the young husband of a sorority sister have recently, and quite suddenly, died, and another friend’s spouse is newly beset with terminal cancer. The heartbreaking news has me scanning Facebook and Caring Bridge posts with greater frequency and with the oft-murmured entreaty: “Help them.”

By contrast, it is springtime at my mother-in-law’s home in the rolling woods of East Texas. The girls and their cousins — barefoot and bare-legged — run in and out the back door calling each other scavengers as they search for treasure before racing scooters down the long, winding driveway with the sun on their arms and faces. Here, the greening has begun; against a background of as yet bare-limbed trees, grasses sprout. I spy a bee carefully alighting on a newly revealed flower even as I am called to Come! See! Play! amidst shrieks and laughter.

This season should come as no surprise, but when winter with its heavy brown coat obscures the living earth, it’s easy to believe the land will remain in a sort of permanent dormancy. Last year, we think, the flowers bloomed. But at the sight of the season’s new-birthed radiance we gasp, as beauty floods senses and spirit as if a promise — perhaps long-forgotten or, in some cases, doubted — is fulfilled.

The funeral last week of my friend’s mother, Nan, a lifelong Episcopalian and woman of the church, fell squarely in mid-Lent. During Lent all weddings, baptisms, and confirmations are postponed until after Easter, and even the altar dressing is minimal. The liturgy, too, reflects the arid aesthetic with a restriction of the word Alleluia. A Lenten funeral, then, would appropriately be as barren as winter.

Nan’s son Patrick and I, and our three younger siblings, rode many years to summer camp in her station wagon. She and my mom claimed the front seats while the rest of us piled up in the back. The heat was stifling in the vinyl-seated car in the ‘70s in Texas in July, but we were too excited to notice. At week’s end, they returned and we, now grimy and sunburned, climbed in again and rested in exhausted silences to the muffled and indistinct sound of our mothers’ voices rising and falling and laughing as the car lumbered home.

We believed life would go on like that forever.

At the funeral, Patrick said that as a little boy his mother allowed him to go down the sidewalk, “only as far as I can see you.” As an older boy, it was “only as far as you can hear me call.” As an adult, the sidewalk became the phone call “to let me know where you are.” Now, he said, “I can’t see her, hear her voice, or let her know where I am.” It is, as he said, a place of great grief.  A winter of the soul.

By contrast, his mother’s funeral was celebrated with the full Easter liturgy:
Celebrant: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”
People: “The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”

Through the tears of our grief and beneath the weight of our loss we said it:

Alleluia. Alleluia.

We strive to understand these mysteries: That grief will turn to joy, that suffering will lead to glory, that death will lead to life. And yet we ever bear witness to this truth:

Winter is the harbinger of spring.

The girls and their cousins are calling me outside to the sun, to the trees, to the new life around them. Their laughter peals even through the heavy windows and walls of the house, beyond which new-birthed beauty floods senses and spirit.

Easter yet flowers forth.

Alleluia. Alleluia.