I Drank Through My Brothers Funeral

He remembers the car. He remembers standing outside afterward and somebody's hand on his shoulder and the fact that it was warmer than anybody expected for October. He remembers that his aunt had made too much food.

He does not remember the service.

Not a word of it. Not the songs, not who spoke, not whether he spoke, and there is a photograph somewhere of him standing at the front which suggests that he did, and he has never asked anybody about it.

Keoni's brother was thirty four. That was four years ago. What happened was sudden and there was nothing anybody could have done, and everybody has said so many times.

And Keoni went through the whole of that week at a particular level. Not falling over. Not a scene. He got everybody where they needed to be and he answered the phone and he stood at the front, apparently, and none of it went in, because there was a level he had found where things could happen without going in.

He stopped drinking two years ago. And what has arrived since, slowly at first and then all at once, is his brother.

Not memories of the funeral. There are none. The brother himself: the actual person, at fourteen, at twenty, on the phone about nothing, the way he said okay so at the start of every sentence. All of it, four years late, arriving in a man who thought he had already been through this.

You know that arrival. It might be a death, an ending, something that happened while you were somewhere else. You got through it at the time. And it turns out that getting through and going through are not the same thing, and the going through is happening now.

You are invited exactly as you are arriving, and you were never required to be composed to come. Jesus said come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, and the qualification He names is the load itself; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that invitation live for a man four years behind on his own grief.

Come unto me

Let me name what is happening, and let me be careful about it, because I do not want to hand you a theory about yourself.

Grief that gets postponed does not expire. It waits. That is not a fault in you and it is not a judgement, it is just what it does. And when it arrives late, it arrives at full size, into a life that has moved on around it, which is disorienting in a way that grief on time is not. Everybody else finished this four years ago. You are starting.

And I am not going to tell you that going through it now is what will keep you standing, because that would make your whole life depend on a piece of work nobody set you, and you are carrying enough.

Here is the invitation, and I want you to look at who is named in it.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

All ye that labor and are heavy laden. That is the description of the invited. Not the ready, not the composed, not the ones who did it properly at the time. The people described are the ones under a weight, and being under the weight is the entire qualification.

You are named in the invitation as you actually are, and you were never going to be admitted on the strength of having handled it well. That is what stands written in Matthew 11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that welcome specific to a man who cannot remember his own brother's funeral.

And I will give you rest. Give. It is not something you arrive at by effort, and it is not the reward at the end of the grieving. He hands it over. Rest, in that sentence, is the thing that comes with the invitation, not the thing that comes after the work.

You are handed rest rather than sent to find it, and you were never being asked to earn your way to the far side of this. Scripture says I will give you rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the giving in a room where a man is four years behind.

And there is one more thing worth having, from two verses later: learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart. He describes His own manner before He asks anybody to come close. Meek and lowly. That is a promise about how you will be handled once you get there, and it is the promise most people never notice, and it is the one that matters when what you are bringing is four years late and full of gaps you cannot account for.

You are going to be handled gently and you were never at risk of being handled otherwise, and He said so about Himself before you got there. The written word has Him describing His own manner in advance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that description trustworthy for a man who is afraid of being asked why he cannot remember.

And the plain thing, which is said in every article here and meant every time. Grief that arrives four years late is heavy, and nobody should carry it on their own. A counselor is a good thing and a grief counselor is a specific good thing. Your doctor, a friend, the room in the church hall on a Tuesday. All of it is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is not weakness and never was.