What Was Said at the Graveside

Eleven words at the graveside, from a colleague, and he has been quietly furious about it for five months, which is a state he has no room for and no vocabulary for and no idea what to do with.

His father died at ninety one. There was no crisis. There were two weeks in a hospital bed and then a morning, and the family were all there, and by every measure that anybody applies to these things it was as good as it gets.

The colleague is a decent man. They have worked in the same faculty for nineteen years. He drove ninety minutes to that graveside on a Tuesday and stood in the wet grass in shoes he had clearly not chosen for it.

And afterward, on the path, walking back toward the gate, he said: at least with a long life like that it is an easier grief.

He meant it kindly. He meant something like: you were spared the worst version of this, and I am glad for you.

And the man he said it to nodded and said thank you.

And here is what has been happening since, and it is the thing he cannot say in a faculty meeting or at a dinner table or to his own wife.

He has been angry. Not with the colleague, or not mainly. With the arithmetic. With the idea, which he has now heard in eleven different phrasings from eleven different well meaning people, that ninety one years is a quantity of father that discharges an obligation.

He was sixty three years old and he had a father, and now he does not, and there is no age at which that becomes a smaller category.

And the reason the anger has nowhere to go is that every single person who said a version of it was being kind, so there is nobody to be angry with, and an anger with no object turns inward and sits in the chest and gets called something else by everybody who notices it.

If that is a chest anybody is carrying, sit down on the bench. Job says this exact thing, and he says it out loud, to their faces, and it is preserved.

Broken in pieces with words

Here is the line, and it is not restrained and it was never edited.

How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words?Job 19:2

Break me in pieces with words.

That is a man who has lost everything, speaking to three friends who came a long way and sat with him for seven days in silence before any of this started, and what he says to them is that their sentences are doing structural damage.

And it is preserved. Nobody smoothed it out. Nobody attached a note about how he should be grateful they came.

You are permitted an anger Scripture keeps on the page, and you were never obliged to be gracious about a sentence that broke something. Job 19:2 is the written word putting a grieving man's plain fury into the canon without one word of correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the complaint survived exactly as it was spoken.

Now notice the shape of what he says, because it is precise and it matters for a man who has nowhere to put this. He does not say they are wicked. He does not say they hate him. He asks how long, which is a complaint about duration and accumulation, and then he names the instrument: words.

That is your five months. It is not one sentence from one colleague. It is eleven phrasings from eleven people and the accumulation of them, and Job had the same experience and used the word broken.

You have been under an accumulation rather than an attack, and you were never wrong to be worn through by the eleventh version of it. Job 19:2 asks how long rather than accusing anybody of malice, and the Spirit of God is not requiring a man to locate a villain before his anger is allowed to exist.

The arithmetic does not work and Scripture knows it

Now the idea itself, because a careful man will not put down an anger he cannot answer intellectually.

The claim inside all eleven phrasings is that grief is inversely proportional to the length of the relationship's remaining reasonable expectation. Ninety one years is a full allocation. A full allocation has been received. Therefore the loss is smaller.

Test it against Scripture and it collapses immediately.

Abraham lives to a hundred and seventy five and his sons bury him. Jacob is a hundred and forty seven, and the account of his death runs to an enormous funeral procession that stops for seven days of mourning at a threshing floor and impresses the Canaanites. Joseph, a grown man, a ruler of Egypt, falls on his father's face and weeps on him.

Nobody in any of those accounts says a word about the age. There is no verse anywhere that scales mourning to a lifespan.

And the reason is that the loss of a father is not the loss of an expectation. It is the loss of the only person in the world who occupied that position, and the position does not shrink because it was occupied for a long time. If anything the opposite is true, and everybody knows it, and nobody says it because it sounds like ingratitude.

You are not grieving an unmet expectation, and you were never given a quantity that got used up. Genesis 50:1 has a grown ruler of Egypt weeping on the face of a father who was a hundred and forty seven, and the Holy Spirit is not standing on that path doing arithmetic.

Where the anger goes

Now the practical problem, because a diagnosis without a disposal is worse than nothing.

The anger has no object. That is what makes it corrosive. Eleven kind people, none of them culpable, and an anger that cannot land anywhere lands in the chest.

Here is what to do with it, and it is not forgiveness, because there is nothing to forgive.

Give it to God as anger, out loud, named as what it is.

That is not irreverence. It is most of the book of Job and about a third of the psalms. There is a psalm that ends by asking God why He hides His face. There is a prophet who accuses God of deceiving him. Job says, in this very chapter, that God has overthrown him, and at the end of the book God says that Job spoke of Him the thing that was right.

The three friends, who were careful and reverent and never once said anything unmeasured, are the ones told they got it wrong.

You are welcome to bring it exactly as it is, and you were never required to make it presentable first. Job 42:7 has God commending the man who spoke plainly over the men who were careful, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a sixty three year old to say it more nicely.