Nobody Brought a Casserole

The man in front of her at the checkout is buying forty tins of custard. Nothing else. Forty tins, in eight neat stacks of five, and he is loading them onto the belt with the calm of a person who has done this before.

Her hand goes to her coat pocket. It does it on its own, the way a hand reaches for a banister. Thumb on the phone, phone half out, because this is exactly the kind of thing, this is the whole category of thing, that she would send to Jo. No caption needed. Just the picture, and within a minute Jo would have sent back something that made her laugh out loud in a checkout line.

The phone is out. Her thumb is on the screen. And then she remembers, standing there between the custard man and a woman with a cart full of diapers, and she puts it back.

Nobody died. That is the thing she cannot say to anyone, because it is the thing that makes it not count. There was no argument. Nobody did anything. Two women who had told each other everything since they were eleven simply, slowly, went quiet. The messages got shorter, then further apart, then it was a recipe, then it was a thumbs up on a photo, then it was a name on a phone that she scrolls past on the way to somebody else. If you asked Jo, Jo would probably say the same thing about her, and it would probably be true.

There was no funeral. Nobody brought a casserole. Nobody has ever once said I am sorry for your loss, because nobody has ever once thought of it as one, including, most days, her.

But her hand went to her pocket. And it will do it again next week, at the next thing only Jo would have found funny, and she will stand in another checkout line with the phone half out and nobody to send it to.

Yours may not be a friend. It may be a marriage that ended without a war, a house you had to leave, a diagnosis that took a future you had already furnished, a child who was never born, a mother who is alive and does not speak to you. The shape is the same. Your hand still reaches, and there was no funeral, and so you have never been let grieve it. And you are standing here, with a loss the size of a person, and no card on the mantel.

The counting was never yours to do

I am not going to explain it. I want to say that first, before anything, because it has probably been explained to you already, or you explained it to yourself, and neither has helped. I do not know why it went quiet. I do not know why the good things end without a reason and I am not going to give you one, because a reason is not what you came here for and it would not fit in your hand anyway.

Here is what I know. A loss is not made real by other people agreeing that it is one. That is the lie underneath the whole thing, and it is a quiet lie, so quiet it may never once have been said out loud. It goes: if nobody brought a casserole, it was not a death; if there was no funeral, I am not allowed the grief. And so you stand at the graveside of something with no grave, holding a grief with no permission slip, waiting for somebody to sign it.

Nobody is going to sign it. And you do not need them to. The One who counts has already counted.

You are holding a grief that was never waiting on anybody’s signature, and you were holding it long before you let yourself call it one. Psalm 56:8 has the tears counted and bottled with no question asked about what they were for, and the Holy Spirit does not require a casserole to arrive before He calls a thing a loss.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.Psalm 147:3-4

Look at what sits next to what in that psalm. The brokenhearted, and the stars. He binds up wounds, and in the very next breath He is out counting stars and naming them, one by one, every one, including the ones no telescope has found. The psalm is not changing the subject. It is telling you what kind of God is doing the binding: the kind who does not lose count of anything, and does not need a thing to be famous before He gives it a name.

You have a loss that is counted, by name, and it was counted before you knew you were allowed to feel it. I am not saying that as a kindness I made up. It is written, in Psalm 147, that He numbers the stars and names them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and turns it toward the exact thing you have never been able to call a loss out loud. He is doing that now. He does not need you to feel better for it to be true.

Sparrows, and hairs, and a friend called Jo

Jesus said a thing about sparrows once, and I think it was said for people like you. Two sparrows for a small coin, He said, and not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father. And then, as if that were not enough: even the hairs of your head are all numbered (Matthew 10:29-30).

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that makes the point too fast. Nobody counts hairs. Nobody counts sparrows. They are the very things a person is allowed to lose without anyone noticing, and that is exactly why He picked them. He was not saying that small losses are actually large. He was saying that His counting does not stop where ours does. Ours stops at what gets a funeral. His does not stop.

You are on the list of the counted, and so is what you lost. That is not my thought; the words are Christ's own, from Matthew 10, and His Spirit is the one who carries a verse about sparrows into a supermarket line and lays it on a hand that just reached for a phone. You did not have to explain it to Him. He saw the hand.

And there is a moment I keep coming back to. Jesus stood at the grave of a friend, and He wept. He knew what He was about to do, and He wept anyway, in front of everybody, because a friend was gone and it was a loss, and He counted it as one. If the Son of God let a loss be a loss, with tears, in public, then the rule that says yours has to earn its grief was never His rule. It came from somewhere else.

You were never asked to prove this loss before you were allowed to grieve it. Scripture shows Christ weeping at a graveside without first checking whether the grief was proportionate, and the Holy Spirit does not run that check on you either. He does not grade a loss. He binds it.

I know what the objection sounds like from the inside, because it is the kind that comes very quietly. But she is alive. But nobody died. But nothing happened. And I would only say: your hand went to your pocket. Something happened. He counted it while your thumb was still on the screen.