Unexpected Gloom

This morning my alarm went off as usual, my feet hit the floor, and for 5 seconds I felt ready for a new day until a perplexing gloom settled itself upon me. Grabbing my glasses and prayer bag, I stumbled for the kitchen, going through my coffee routine, awaiting that first sip taken as I sank into the Word of God, the physical and spiritual comfort reminding me that mornings are ok after all. Instead, as I tapped my phone to check the time, the calendar reminder "Heidi's funeral 2023" glared back at me immediately diagnosing this pea-soup fog in which my spirit was struggling to breathe. I felt drawn to read Job, a book I haven't read since last January when it felt all too apropos.

In hindsight that might not have been the best choice for today. I was hoping my usually helpful Intro to the OT (the final book I gifted Heidi) would shed some hopeful light on its end, but this time it did not add anything I hadn't already found myself: God does not cause evil, but God's permissive will allows suffering and He uses it in accordance with his hidden purposes. A year on, my flawed and limited human estimation can not ascertain anything valuable enough for Heidi to have been taken either so young, nor in such a gruesome manner. In the face of this, I steadfastly choose to trust that God's hidden purposes are so much greater than I will ever know; I know that's what Heidi would say to all of us.

The morning's gloom caught me off guard, I hadn't felt like this on the 14th, the 1st anniversary of her death, but that weekend I had intentionally crammed our lives full of distraction - all the cousins bursting the seams of our house, and the joy of new memories made even as we recalled the hard ones. One of the many treasures of this extended family of ours is the ease with which we can talk about Heidi - her tremendous gifts of faith, intellect, motherhood, her quirks, the good memories and even the difficult ones (tempered or omitted around little ears). It is a gift that she still exists so seamlessly in our life together, never spoken of in hushed or awkward tones, but as though she were simply out of the room or on a retreat.

I crashed for a bit following the morning rush of getting the kids to school and this along with other distractions helped lift the fog. I found myself recalling Heidi's beautiful funeral Mass, about which her parish priest said, "It was a beautiful funeral. I've never seen my church so full for a funeral... It was very moving." To each of you that trekked out for her funeral Mass, or joined online, thank you for showering your prayers upon Heidi, the Keiser family, and all of us, then and now. I'm not sure many of you know, but her parish priest, a childhood friend of ours no less, volunteered to orchestrate her entire funeral, knowing well Heidi's preferences and that Kevin was beyond taxed by grief. There is no one on the planet I would've preferred for that role and if I can be cliché, he knocked it out of the park. 

(link to her funeral Mass available on YouTube)

The grace is more. When I die, perhaps that can be carved on my headstone; it is the truth I learned in that valley of the shadow of death. I am not good at clinging to this truth when the gloom of memory divorced of grace is so thick that every cell of my body is stifled by it - but it is nevertheless undeniably true that when we stared at the horrors of hell inflicted on my living sister's body and foresaw a wifeless, motherless future, the gates of hell did not prevail; The Grace Was More.

"I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes - I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me." Job 19:25-27