Decoration Day at the Hillside

She has been going up that hill on the second Sunday in May since 1985.

Bucket, scrub brush, the good stiff one, a jar of water from the spigot at the bottom, a rag, a paper sack for the old flowers. She knows the order she does them in. Her mother's people are at the top under the two cedars, her father's are along the fence line, and there is a row of small stones from an influenza year that belong to nobody living, and she has cleaned those every May for forty years because somebody ought to.

She has done that hill in rain. She has done it the year she had the cast on. She did it the May after her mother went, and she did it the May after her brother, and both of those times she got through the whole hill and did not stop once.

Ray died in November.

He is up there now, third row from the fence, on the left, next to the space that has her name on it already with the dash and nothing after it.

The second Sunday in May is three weeks out and she has the bucket ready by the back door same as always and she does not know how to do it.

That is the thing she cannot say to her daughter. She does not know how to do it. Not the hill. She could do the hill blindfolded. She does not know how to kneel down in front of that particular stone with a scrub brush in her hand and do to it what she has done to four hundred other stones on that hill, because for forty years the cleaning has been a thing she does for people who are gone and Ray is not gone the way they are gone, not yet, not to her, not on a Tuesday when she still turns to say something to him about the weather.

And there is another thing. Every year the family comes. There will be twenty of them on that hill with folding chairs and a cooler and a card table, because that is what the second Sunday in May has been in that family since before she married into it. They will be kind. Somebody will bring her a chair. And she is going to have to be a person on that hill in front of twenty people.

If anybody has stood at a back door looking at a bucket like that, stay with me. There is one line in the hundred and sixteenth psalm that changes what that morning is being asked to be.

God keeps His own accounts on that hill

Here is the verse, and I want to be careful with it, because it gets used to say something it does not say.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.Psalm 116:15

That is not a sentence about where anybody is. It is a sentence about what a death is worth to God.

The word there carries weight and cost. It is the word for something valuable, something not spent lightly, something that is not nothing to the one holding it. What the psalm is saying is that a death is not a small item passing through the books of heaven. It registers. It is expensive to God.

Which means the eleventh of November already registered. Before the funeral, before the casseroles, before the winter, before the first Tuesday she turned to say something about the weather and he was not there. God did not need to be told what it cost.

You are held by a God who has already entered that November in His own accounts, and you were held on the hill in the rain and in the cast and in every May you got through without stopping once. Psalm 116:15 is the written word calling a death precious in His sight, and the Spirit who breathed that line has been standing at a back door with a woman looking at a bucket.

And there is a second thing sitting in that psalm that people miss. Look at what comes right after it. The next verse is the psalmist calling himself the servant of the Lord and saying, thou hast loosed my bonds. The psalm does not go from the death to an explanation. It goes from the death to a man saying, I am Yours, and You have set me loose.

Nothing is explained anywhere in that psalm. Something is only ever counted.

You have a God who counts the loss instead of accounting for it, and you were never once asked by Him to make sense of the eleventh of November. Psalm 116:16 turns from the death straight to loosened bonds without a word of explanation in between, and the Holy Spirit has never handed a widow a reason in place of Himself.

Forty years of that hill was not practice for this

Let me say the thing that is underneath, because I think it has been sitting on her since the bucket came out.

There is a voice that says a woman who has cleaned four hundred stones ought to be able to clean one more. It says forty years should have prepared her. It says a person who has done the hill after her mother and after her brother has no business standing at a back door in April unable to decide.

That voice is not the Spirit of God.

Nothing on that hill was ever practice. Cleaning her mother's stone did not train her for Ray's. Grief is not a skill that accumulates, and the fact that she got through the hill in 1997 without stopping is not a standard she now has to meet.

And the reason it is different is not weakness. It is that Ray is closer. Forty years of marriage sits differently in a body than anything else does, and the stone with the dash and no date after it is her own, and she is going to kneel down in front of that with a scrub brush in her hand, and there is no year of practice in the world that makes a person ready for that.

You are not behind on anything because forty years did not make this easy, and you were never in training for the second Sunday in May. Nothing in the whole written word makes a mourner's competence a measure of her faith, and the Spirit of God is not standing at the fence line grading a woman on her form.

Nobody gets to tell you how to do that hill

Now the part where I have to hold my hands still, because helping here would be harming.

I am not going to tell anybody how to spend the second Sunday in May.

Do the whole hill the way you always have. Do the hill and leave his for last. Do the hill and let one of the boys do his. Do his first and go home before the chairs come out. Skip the whole thing and sit at your own kitchen table with the radio on. Every one of those is a real thing a real person might do, and every one of them, handed over as advice, turns that Sunday into a job with a grade at the end.

Forty years does not owe anybody a forty first.

And I want to say this as plainly as I know how, because the family will be up there with the cooler and the card table, and somebody will notice what she does and does not do. If the scrub brush stays in the bucket, that is not neglect. If she cannot kneel at that row, that is not a failure of love, and it is certainly not a failure of faith. Ray knew her for forty years. Nothing about the second Sunday in May is going to tell anybody anything they did not already know about that marriage.

You are free on that hill in a way none of those twenty people will think to say to you out loud. Colossians 2:16 says let no man judge you in respect of a holyday, and the Holy Spirit does not overrule an old woman's own conscience about her own husband's stone.