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“These are the things they left behind: a University of Michigan sweatshirt that still smells of her; his stuffed bunny from childhood, the one with a single button eye; a peso from the Dominican Republic; a Harley-Davidson; some dog tags; a void.”

This is how an article from The New York Times from May of 2004 began as it detailed the physical stuff that parents and spouses and siblings of those who have died in Iraq clung to in their grief and remembrance of their loved ones.

I was mesmerized by the article as it described the stuff of the dead that the living hold onto—photographs and other belongings. Particularly poignant to me was the story of a mother who had lost her 19-year-old daughter to a roadside bomb. She had asked that her daughter’s used laundry be returned to her and was broken-hearted to find out that the army had already laundered it. But then a returning soldier brought the mother a surprise gift, a bag filled with her daughter’s unwashed clothes. Within that bag was a sweatshirt with the smell of her daughter still on it.

And so the stuff of the dead—things we can look at, touch, even smell—become a link to the person we have lost and a link to the grief that is still with us. For while grief can feel general and pervasive, like weather we wake up to day after day or a planet we have come to live on, grief and loss are fundamentally specific. It is a person with a specific look, a specific voice, even a specific smell whom we have lost, whom we grieve.

That’s where the idea of coming tonight with photos or tokens of departed loved ones came from. Any words our faith offers us about loss have to stand up before the specific people death has separated us from.

And so for me, tonight has to be about wading into, and being wounded by the particular once again: getting in touch with the names, the faces, the bodies, even the smells of those we love who are no longer with us. And it’s a time to look again at who we cling to as our redeemer in this transitory life and what that means exactly.

And so let’s go to the particular—who is the person or people you bring here tonight upon your heart? What do they look like? Sound like? Smell like? What is the particular physical nature of the loss you’ve experienced?

Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director recounts what he’s learned about grief in helping families arrange thousands of funerals and burials in and around his hometown of Mitford, Michigan. Lynch sees his job both as undertaker and as a poet concerned with, as he says, “organizing some response to what is unspeakable.”

Often, he says pastors or even family members attempt to console and protect those who are grieving by distancing themselves from and minimizing the physical nature of the loss. Sometimes, he says, a well-meaning but misguided person refers to the body of someone who has died as “just a shell”

“Well, in some ways it is a shell,” Lynch says, “but it’s the “just a” part that I have a problem with…The emphasis, when you say (someone’s body is) “just a shell,” is on minimalization, as if it shouldn’t hurt, because it’s “just a shell.” It is the one and only shell most of us get. It is the one and only shell that we rush to the hospital, that we’ve had coffee with for 40 years; it is the shell that put us through college. It is the one and only body of the one we love.”

“Grief is the tax we pay on loving people.” Lynch goes on to say. I would add, and I believe that Lynch would agree with me, that the depth of the love we feel and therefore, the size of the grief tax we pay gets all tied up in the particular physical connection or attachment we allow ourselves to have with those who have died.

And so it makes all the sense in the world that if there can be any remedy for our loss—and there are times I’m not sure there can be—it must come in the form of an embodied God who himself knew what it was like to live in a world of physical experiences and relationships, of taste and touch and sight and smell.

It makes all the sense in the world that our embodied God knew what it was like to love the people in his life and himself suffer the grief tax that comes with a loving attachment to others. And it makes all the sense in the world that our embodied God, our Savior, would himself die.

But then this is when the story stops making perfect sense. For we believe that our Savior’s death becomes the passageway to another place, a place detailed for us in countless Biblical images that in one way or another point at the Paschal mystery. Our savior’s death becomes a passageway: to a place of light out of the darkness, to a place of wine and feasting after a long deprivation, to a place of water and new life after a deadly dryness. This, I believe, cannot be explained, can only hoped for, can only be waited for, can only be yearned for as we touch the particulars again and again of our losses, feeling the weight of the grief tax we pay on account of our love.

My father died in June of 2001. Besides the loss of my daughter, it has probably been the loss that has been most devastating for me.

A few months after his death I had a dream.

I was in the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Columbus GA. This was the house my mother had brought me home to as an infant in that my father was away in Korea when I was born.

At any rate, in the dream I was standing in the front yard when my father appeared from the yard next door. He took me by the hand and led me to the side of the house next door and there streaming out of the foundation of the house was living water, cool, fresh and new. I was astonished. Where had this water come from I asked him. What did it mean?

The water bubbled out into the yard and toward my grandmother’s house. My father said nothing.

And then without a word my father turned and hugged me—so tight and so real that when I woke up I could still feel the pressure of his body against mine, and yes, I believed I could even smell him.

He it seemed was saying goodbye. God, I believe, was saying that goodbye is not the only thing his loss would mean for me.

Embodied grief. An embodied God. A passageway from darkness to light, from deprivation to wine and feasting, from deadly dryness to water and new life.

Works Cited

“What They Left Behind; Far From Iraq, Echoes of Lives Lost in Combat:” May 30, 2004 in The New York Times Religion and Ethics, May 4, 2001, Interview with Thomas Lynch