Pushing away the pain

From my window I watch her, slowly, unsteadily walking, helped step by step by her daughter. She is ninety years old, but it is not age that makes her walk with such helplessness. It is more the losing of her middle-aged son to a sudden heart attack.

I had watched a week ago as she had stumbled across the compound to the hearse that had brought her son’s body from the morgue. I had watched as she cried out: “He’s smiling!” And all of us around knew it was the last hope of a mother, the clinging to a belief that he could not have left before her.

How terrible is the finality of death especially to parents who know that they should have gone before.

Today, I shall not try to philosophize about death, but try and give words of comfort to those who have wept over the body of a loved one because what moves through us is a silence, a quiet sadness, a longing for one more day, one more word, one more touch. We may not understand why that loved one left this earth so soon, or why he or she left before we were ready to say goodbye, but little by little, we begin to remember not just that they died, but that they lived. And that their life gave us memories too beautiful to forget.

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