(This one is for family history and is long and I won’t be offended if you skip on past it)
I know I grew up hearing the hymn but my first meaningful memory of it was at my paternal grandfather’s funeral. “God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again…” I don’t know that I cried then. I am sure my grandmother cried and was lonely for almost two more decades before she passed and joined my grandfather.
As I sat at an acquaintances funeral this week the closing hymn started playing my friend sitting next to me broke down. The last time I had heard the hymn was at the funeral of her husband. How do you mend a broken heart? The pain of a husband and companion who had passed too soon after a brave battle with cancer that seemed to be in remission and then was back with a vengeance and he was suddenly gone.
I realized as we sang the hymn and wept that it was no longer a hymn, it was music, a hymn, set to the memories of the past 8 years. Loss upon loss that has made me more fearful and more often reach for faith especially as I tuck my boys in at night and try to peacefully fall asleep or when I watch the school bus pull away with Jeremy or when my husband leaves for work. All the moments you become more attune to after repeated unexpected loss. The memories of loss that make you try harder to live more fully and love more deeply…
A brother-in-law who died suddenly, accidently and tragically and the memory of my sister weeping outside the Relief Society room door, before walking into his viewing, repeating, “I can’t do this.” However, she did…because really, what choice do we have?
Watching my husband grieve at the sudden death of his son and make a long drive to Wyoming to attend the funeral while he left another son behind on a respirator in the NICU. Jerry didn’t know if he could do it. How do you leave one son behind to bury another? You do.
Another sister burying a small child who had tragically died in a car accident and watching her hold him and hold him again and hold him again while weeping and weeping and weeping and then watching as she placed him back in the coffin for the last time and watched the lid close. We had helped her pick hymns by singing them aloud to her to help her remember which hymns were which because her mind was clouded by grief. “How does that one go again?” Sisters sang the words and she chose the hymns for a service to recognize the life of her child.
My sister, who had grieved for her previous husband, it didn’t seem like that long before, grieve as she carried a child who would probably die and then did two and a half hours after birth. We all held him and she held him, held him, held him, and wept as she placed him in the tiniest coffin, tucked a blanket in around him, and kissed him and she placed the lid on the coffin. It seemed impossible that one person could have so much pain. My grief for my sister’s pain combined with my own as I began miscarrying a much-wanted pregnancy the night of the funeral. I am ashamed to admit, I could not get home fast enough. The combined grief was overwhelming.
My paternal grandmother passed but we were happy for her sweet reunion with my grandpa. Sometimes death is a sweet release from a life well lived.
Grief can also have funny moments of remembering…helping my sister dress her husband for burial (he was modest), spraying cologne because he loved it and never left home without it and true to form, Jennifer said something that had us laughing until we were crying. I can’t remember what it was that she said, something about enough cologne to get through eternity, but it was funny and we laughed hard and he would have thought it was funny too.
My sister Kathryn made me laugh while my grandmother was dying. We were sitting in my grandmother’s room together and I can’t remember what she said but we laughed and laughed and my grandmother would have been completely ok with that because she wanted to go. The only reason she would have been upset that day is because she couldn’t cook for us and make us eat too much food at a table that had to be set to eat at.
Jennifer handing me TJ to hold, at the funeral home, and when I told her how cute he was she said, “Yep, he was even cuter alive.” I told her she was seriously sick and she said, “Well, it’s true.” and we laughed. Then she wept while she and her husband dressed him in the blessing gown I had pulled out of the cedar chest, at my parent’s house in St George, on the way to Sandy. She wept for weeks and weeks longer and now we laugh about post partum depression because we were both blessed with babies this past summer after the summer of loss…
Time does heal all wounds, the pain subsides, which is easy to say because none of these losses have been so keenly mine as they were theirs, but I know my family enough to know that faith does heal, time does heal, church attendance does heal, temple worship does heal. You never forget but you heal. Mostly what I realized the other day is “God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again” is not our farewell wish to them, it is their farewell blessing on us because they are well, they are busy and our sojourn here on earth continues.
God is with us but we can only feel His comfort if we let Him in and let the healing begin.
