Avent 22 - death

Today I met someone who is grieving. I was reminded how brutally out of nowhere, grief can strike, the most random of happenings, words, faces or places leaving you blind-sided.

It made me think about my own grief, which is still close despite the distance.

I once read of a church in Christchurch, NZ which held a "Blue Christmas" service, recognising how hard Christmas is for many for reasons of grief, loneliness, family breakdown or isolation and so on. I think there would be real power in such a service, and probably healing too.

I remembered too how one of the schools I worked in had a memory tree, a fir tree which pupils placed messages on to those relatives - living or dead - which they wouldn't see at Christmas.

I also accidentally found this poem by Mary Oliver.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.