When The World Needs To Stop

A few weeks ago I attended the funeral of a beloved uncle.  He was one of the last of my dad's brothers, and it pained us all to watch my father and his other brother sit and wipe away tears as they said their final goodbyes to the man who was once a boy along side them.  To a man who took a whipping along with them for throwing rocks at the windows of an abandoned house (a whipping they didn't deserve, since they weren't the gang of boys who threw the rocks).  I watched his wife mourn, hugged my cousins and said "I'm sorry for your loss."  I sat through the funeral service remembering the times my uncles and my dad and my aunt would all sit together and play their guitars, sing old hymns, connecting through music in a way that not many families are able to do.

But my tears didn't flow until, in my car on the way to his burial site, I noticed every car in the oncoming lane stopping in reverence for our family's loss; in honor of a life lived well and finally taken away by disease and age.  As we drove past a construction site, the workers there stopped their digging, got down from their machines and stood with their hard hats over their hearts until we passed.  It touched me so deeply that the world around us, in this small little town would take the time to acknowledge our grief, to stop for a minute with us to honor our experience and the life that was no more.

When someone you love dies, you really do feel like time stops for a while; at least it does for you.  The rest of the world?  It just keeps on going.  People keep driving to their appointments, going to work, making dinner, laughing, talking, singing; while inside, you feel as though the void left inside you has created a huge precipice over which you have to find your way around, or over, or through, and until you get the courage to start the process of figuring how to get to the other side, you want so badly for time to just slow down, or stop and wait for you to catch up.

Today I learned of a tragedy.  My dear friend lost her son.  The son who was born about 9 months after my daughter.  We always joked that he was conceived on the day she came to visit me in the hospital after I had my daughter because she was so bitten by the baby bug.  The sweet little round-faced, curly headed boy who sat in the back seat of the car with my daughter as an infant and pulled out her hair bows, the boy who said things to my daughter like, "I wouldn't marry you when I grow up because you're too much girl for me." (he was about six years old then) The boy who told silly jokes and got embarrassed to hug me when he got to be a teenager, the boy who loved sports (Greenbay Packers) and adored his mother and father, the boy who was a "little banker" as a kid, always looking for loose change and keeping it hidden away in his room.  That boy, who grew up to be a young man with his own wife whom he adored and his own son whom he loved with all his heart was wiped from this Earth in one senseless act of violence that could never have been predicted.

I called his mother an spoke to her for a few minutes this evening.  I could hear in her voice, the pause of time.  A pause she needs to take for herself, a pause that will ultimately bring her healing, and a pause that everyone around her needs to honor and respect.  Some say the first stage of grief is denial, and maybe this stopping of time has something to do with the need for our hearts to catch up with the knowledge of our minds; whatever it is, it is a necessary part of grief that often gets overlooked as we rush the bereaved to make arrangements, make decisions, plan a funeral, act as bereft as we think they should.

In honor of the great pause, I turned off my TV tonight.  I sat in silence for a while and said a prayer for my dear friend, for his little sisters, his wife and son, and for my own daughters who thought of him like a part of our family.  I told my friend she could call me any time she wanted to talk--told her I would call and check on her later in the week.  But for tonight, I want to honor his life and her grief by just stopping for a while.  My regular routine seems less important.  My own heart needs to pause for a while, let the tragedy sink in, I feel such a responsibility to just pause, to remember, to honor, respect, and be thankful for the life that was, even though it was cut tragically short.

You may not think it much of a gesture to stop your car when you encounter a funeral procession, but let me tell you from experience, when you take that few moments to pause with those who are in that place where the world has seemingly stopped turning, you comfort them by acknowledging the loss they've suffered.  You give validation to the importance of the life that was lost.  You show them that you understand the pause inside their hearts and minds, and that you care enough to honor it.   I know in bigger towns you rarely see this happen anymore, but I, for one, will make it a point from now on to stop and wait, no matter how annoyed the driver behind me gets, no mater how late I'm running.

And I hope we can all strive to understand why the world needs to stop with us, if even for just a few seconds, when we lose someone we love.   Stop doing and start being.  Be the friend who listens.  Be the friend who hugs, who sits in silence, who holds a hand or takes care of the every day minutia while the grieving person takes a pause from the race.  Learn to let them be; be sad, be lonely, be angry, be afraid, be lost, be whatever they are in the moment.  Just stop with them.  Just be.