Celebrating life

 Saturday a week ago, I celebrated a joyful wedding as my grandson Aren married his Anna. Saturday, two days ago, I celebrated another major event—the memorial service of a dear friend. The two celebrations were similar in many ways, but also very different.

Actually, in the last few weeks, we’ve worked our way emotionally through the deaths of two good friends. Strangely, both their services were on Saturday at 10:00. So Hal attended Linda’s service and I went to the one for Deloris. Each of the two memorial services genuinely celebrated a life well lived.

But still, it wasn’t the same as a wedding. We’ll continue to enjoy our grandchildren for years, God willing, participating in their joys, celebrating the birth of their babies (again, God willing), supporting them in their trials (inevitable), and relishing all we see God doing in and through their lives. With Linda and Deloris, we said goodbye. I will miss Linda’s sense of humor and her constant reminders to pray for our grandchildren. I can hardly imagine being without Deloris’ encouragement, her telling us how blessed her life has been, even as she was suffering pain that increased to the day of her death. Linda was about two years younger than me; Deloris, ten years older. Their life celebrations were joyful and sorrowful at the same time.

I find the difference between the terms memorial service and funeral interesting. Google tells me that the basic difference is the presence of the body in a funeral. In the memorial service, the physicality expresses itself in the photos of the person who has died.

When I was growing up, my parents didn’t take us kids to funerals. I think now that they probably should have. Seeing the body might have been traumatic, but so is death and children need to learn to accept it.

Or maybe not. Do we ever come to accept death? I’m not sure I do. Yes, I know it’s inevitable. It’s part of life, as some experts tell us. And that’s probably true. But the shock and the sense of void tell me it’s not entirely acceptable. St. Paul calls death the last enemy that will be defeated when the kingdom of God comes in its fulness.

The adjective, funereal, is defined as glum, morbid, sorrowful, and other such words. In literature the word is used for more than funerals. Uriah Heap had a funereal face. Dark and stormy nights are sometimes referred to as funereal.

Even so, funerals can be meaningful times, punctuated with joy if the deceased was a Christian. In Latin America, where I lived for many years, people usually commemorate their dead with funerals, preceded by a wake with the body present. Whole families, including children, gather to express their grief, sometimes loudly. It makes death real and probably helps the mourners move forward.

And, of course, faith in that good place the dead in Christ go to comforts. The stronger our belief, the greater the comfort. But comfort sometimes comes gradually and grief can take a long time.

In any event, I’m glad for the preponderance of memorial services these days.

In both memorial services Hal and I attended on Saturday, the grown children of the deceased gave testimonials about their mother. Both were beautiful tributes. In Deloris’ service, her youngest son ended his tribute by quoting from the ending of CS Lewis’ The Last Battle, the final book in his Chronicles of Narnia. Its words bring me great joy and anticipation:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. 

Amen.