We Never Once Talked Sober

It came to her doing something else entirely, the way the big ones always do. She was cutting the tops off carrots at the sink and thinking about nothing.

Thirty one years of Wednesdays. Val's kitchen or hers, alternating, since their girls were at the school together. Val is the person Doreen told about the lump before she told her husband. Val is the person who came at four in the morning the night the boy was in hospital. Val has said things to her across a kitchen table that Doreen has thought about for two decades.

And standing at the sink with a carrot in her hand, Doreen worked out that in thirty one years, not once, not a single Wednesday, had either of them been sober for any of it.

Not drunk. Neither of them has ever been drunk on a Wednesday afternoon in their lives, and both of them would be insulted at the suggestion. But there was always the bottle in the middle of the table and it was always open by two and it was always empty by five, and that had been true since 1994 and neither of them had ever remarked upon it.

Doreen stopped drinking in March. It is now September. She has been to Val's four times and it has been strange four times, and the strangeness has no name, and now she has a name for it and she wishes she did not.

Thirty one years of the best friendship she has ever had, and she does not know what any of it would have been like.

You know that discovery. It might be a friend, a sister, a marriage. Nothing bad happened in it. It was good. And you have found out, late, that all of it happened in one particular weather, and you have no idea what any of it looks like in the sun.

You are allowed to weep over something that is not lost, and you were never being disloyal to hope by grieving. At Lazarus's grave, Jesus wept, and He wept while knowing exactly what He was about to do about it; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that permission real for a woman standing at a sink with a carrot in her hand.

Jesus wept

Let me say the honest thing before anything else, because at my age I have stopped seeing the point of the other kind.

The temptation, when you find this out, is to reach for one of two lies, because both of them are more comfortable than the truth. The first lie is that none of it was real, that it was only ever the drink talking, and thirty one years can be filed away as a mistake. The second lie is that it does not matter, that you should not be dwelling on it, and there is nothing to grieve because Val is still alive and you saw her in June.

Both lies do the same job: they get you out of grief without going through it. And the price of both of them is the same. You lose the thirty one years.

So here is the shortest verse in the book, and the most useful.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

He is standing outside a tomb. He knows precisely what He is going to do, in about four minutes, in front of everybody. He knows Lazarus is coming out of that hole alive. And He weeps anyway, in public, with the resolution already in His hand.

You are permitted to grieve a thing God is going to sort out, and you were never told that hope cancels the weeping. That is what stands written in John 11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that permission solid for a woman who has been telling herself she should not be dwelling on it.

Notice too that nobody in the story corrects Him. The bystanders make a remark about how much He must have loved him, and the text does not present the tears as a lapse or a failure of faith or a temporary bit of humanity He had to work through. It sets them down as what love does when it looks at damage, even damage it is about to repair.

You are doing what love does when it looks at damage, and you were never behaving badly by feeling this. Scripture records the weeping without one word of apology for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the embarrassment out of a grief that has no death in it.

And now the part that settles the first lie. The Jesus who wept at that tomb is the one who made Lazarus in the first place, and the friendship He was weeping over was a real friendship, made by Him, and the damage did not retroactively unmake it. Whatever weather your Wednesdays happened in, Val came at four in the morning. That happened. It was not the bottle that drove to the hospital.

You are holding thirty one real years, and you were never given a friendship that a discovery in September could unmake. The written word never treats a damaged good thing as though it had never been good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from throwing out decades to tidy up an afternoon.

And the plain thing, and this is me talking to you the way I would across my own table. You have got four strange visits behind you. Strange is what a thing is while it is changing shape, and it is not the same as broken. Go a fifth time. Go at a different hour, in the daylight, and take something to do with your hands, because two women who have always had something in front of them need something in front of them. And the friend, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight where people say exactly this, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it, at any age at all.