Day 2 Gratitude: For All the Saints

Today marks the 37th anniversary of the passing of my first boyfriend from college. We met at an organized social gathering prior to the start of our freshman year. We didn’t stay together, but he always mattered to me–and to so many who met him, including the students and student-athletes he would teach and coach. The world needs/needed people like him–but he only got 25 years to share his love for people. 

His death fell on All Saints’ Sunday–which was so appropriate, given his focus on taking care of the people around him.

That loss–on that particular Sunday so early in my life–cemented how important that day is for me in the church year. All Saints’ Day is a sacred time for us to remember all those who mattered to us and to the larger world. 

I am grateful for everyone who has touched my life and who is no longer here in this life. Neighbor girl, former boyfriend, grandparents, aunts, uncles, Dad, Mom, college roommate, nephew, sister-in-law–and so many more I have known and loved in my days. 

And the ache from the absences of so many loved ones make me feel even more gratitude for the peace of the resurrection.

Gone is Gone–But Not Forgotten

(c) 2011 Sherman Lambert, Rosebush given by Chris (Diehl) Geiss in honor of my mother, Elda Mae (Ritter) Lange

Día de los Muertos. I cannot forget this day from thirty years ago. On a surprisingly blue-skied Ohio afternoon, the dried leaves blew in circles around the sundial. Time might have moved forward from then, but on that day, it stopped on what I had hoped might be forever. Youth, though, has many promises and distractions—preparing for projects and finals, finding a date for an upcoming dance, making up my mind not to become stuck in what could not be—there was no time to mourn if I wanted to live.

That, however, was another youthful fallacy. The truth is it is necessary to mourn one’s losses in order to live deeply. Moving on without resolving the past only appears to be moving.

Still, I kept up the appearance of resolution even as I held others away from me.

Another November five years later, though I did not yet know it, Heaven received its newest saint on what our church celebrates as All Saints’ Sunday. That weekend I was busy celebrating Halloween and watching our pro football team beat his pro football team—while he was earning his wings.

Not until two months later did I hear the news of his passing. Yet when I did, I discovered how I had postponed my own life in so many ways by not mourning years ago. This time, though, gone meant gone forever. What good would it do me to pretend otherwise?

That was almost half my lifetime ago. Hard to believe someone with so much to offer this world only got twenty-five years to do so. So while I get that gone is gone, I’ll never stop wondering why.

Ever since that loss, All Saints’ Sunday has become a very important church day for me—I know a saint who rested from his labors too early on that day, fittingly just hours after reaching out to someone else in need.

Each year the church reads the names of those saints who have left us in the preceding months—over the years, I have added so many names to the lifelong list I hear in my own mind on that day. Some lived full lives, some welcomed death as a blessing, and others’ lives were cut short. This year my mother’s name will be spoken aloud.

Gone is gone from me for now, yet I believe those saints live on and that one day I too will rest with them in that life eternal. However, that doesn’t mean I’m OK with that now—all that by and by in the sky stuff seems pretty far away when I’m missing someone.

The thing is I’ve learned that acting as if my losses don’t matter gets in the way of drinking deeply from the life I have—or will have as the hurt becomes less constant. Sooner or later I have to mourn—and it might as well be sooner so I can get on with being present in the days I have been given—which are so many more than some I have known and loved.

What happened a quarter of a century ago devastated me, but finally facing the truth gave some boundaries to my grief and opened my heart to what came next: meeting a man less than two weeks later who has been my true love throughout this most recent half of my lifetime.

No, I don’t forget those who are gone from my life, whether by life’s twists or by death, but I also no longer try to forget what I do remember. Instead, I just work on living through it—no doubt that kind of heart work is part of our own lifelong labors, just as it was for all our saints who from their labors now rest.