DEAR READERS, if you ever met someone crying, what would you say to that person? I am asking this question because only yesterday a married couple I know told me how their child Tommy, who is just 4 years old, was able to handle this difficult situation.
This couple lives next door to an elderly man who has recently been widowed. The man had married very young, and had lived with his wife for over 60 years. They had no children, and the sudden death of his wife, from an aortic aneurysm, had left him quite devastated.
The death of one’s spouse is one of the most painful of losses, and is often fraught with negative consequences. Nothing will ever be the same – one feels bewildered, frightened, and unprepared to face life’s new challenges by oneself.
One day Tommy was playing in the courtyard of their block of flats when he saw the elderly man weeping on a bench. The small boy instinctively left his games and sat down beside him, clasping the man’s wrinkled hand warmly with his own soft little hands.
Tommy’s mother, who was watching all this from her apartment window, was quite moved by the sight, and when the boy returned home she asked him, “What did you say to our next-door neighbour?” “Nothing, mum,” was the reply. “I just helped him to weep.”
Isn’t it nice to hear that a small boy was able to do the right thing at the right time? An adult would probably have waited ‘for the right moment’; he or she would have first considered what words to use, and would then have said them feeling very uneasy and embarrassed. Children, on the other hand, have first-hand knowledge of frailty; they still have to learn to hide it. This is why Tommy was able to comfort the old man so easily and spontaneously.
If we believe that God looks lovingly upon our frailty because each one of us is “precious and honoured in his sight,” then it is easy to understand that to comfort the grieving is one of the most important things we can do.
November opens with the memory of our dear departed, a memory that fills us all with longing and a certain amount of pain. However, the remembrance of those who are no longer with us is celebrated by us as believers in the light of that eternal destiny which God has reserved for all Christians: a future in which we will enjoy a wonderful existence which cannot even be faintly compared with the life we are living now. And so we can see dying as the journey into love without measure, a journey where we return whence we came, to have the same love lavished on us that is lavished on Jesus. Death is, in actual fact, a wonderful voyage into never-ending light, as Bishop Charles Henry Brent (1862-1929) reminds us:
What is dying?
A ship sails and I stand watching
till she fades on the horizon,
and someone at my side
says, “She is gone.”
Gone where? Gone from my sight,
that is all; she is just as
large as when I saw her...
the diminished size and total
loss of sight is in me, not in her,
and just at the moment
when someone at my side
says “she is gone,” there are others
who are watching her coming,
and other voices take up the glad shout,
“there she comes!”… and that is dying.
To remember our dearly departed means to live in the awareness that human life is fleeting and fragile, yet illuminated by hope, because after all, at the end of our life’s journey, “a new earth and a new heaven” await us.
“What did you say to our neighbour?” my friend asked her son. “Nothing, mum, I only helped him to cry.”
And what would we say to those who need to be comforted?
Updated on October 06 2016