AND SO WE LEARN
TO ACCEPT GOD’S SEASONS
A Widow Bit – Nov. 16, 2008
By Mary Koch

            “You’re never ready to lose a child,” he said.

            We were walking slowly, arm in arm – the father, mother and I – up a grassy hillside, away from the small pond and towering tree where, moments earlier, the ashes of their son had been scattered.

            More than forty years ago, this family with two sons and two daughters adopted me as an honorary aunt. I’ve been a witness to and occasional participant in their amazing saga, and they are dear to my heart. As with any family, there have been the marriages, the births, the divorces, the successes, the sorrows, the comings, the goings. It always seemed as if this family did these things at a higher pitch and velocity than most.

            They were rambunctious kids, the ones who called me “Aunt Mary,” testing life, rejecting anything conventional, living on the edge. The decades have not tamed them.

            Now they have raised their own children. I drove across the state to this memorial gathering because it would be first time in too many years that I’d see them all together. Minus their brother.

            It was my first chance to sort out the third generation, and I marveled at the grace and poise of these 20-somethings. At the threshold of adulthood, they’re eagerly taking on the world, looking forward with every ounce of their being.

            I remember being at that threshold. I’m dumfounded to be so far along the journey in what seems so short a time. I still look forward, but my perspective has narrowed with the viewpoint of age. When you’re young, the future is an immense sea of opportunity, the horizon so far off you don’t worry about reaching it. Now the sea has become smaller, more like a lake, still enchanting, but the shoreline is visible. Another decade, maybe two, and the future will be as small as that pond at the bottom of the hill we were climbing.

            Earlier in the afternoon, we’d sat in a small country church and heard the preacher read from Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven . . . “

            Inwardly, I bridled – not at the preacher, but at God. It is most unseasonable, I argued, for my friends to be mourning a son, the sweet child who became a man – a man whose soul was his music and whose music should not have ended so soon. 

            But it had been time for his suffering to end, his devastating fight with cancer to cease.

            Darkness enveloped us as we climbed the hill and we went home, the parents and I. We nibbled from the platters of food that inevitably arrive at a house of mourning and agreed, at 7 p.m., that it was not too early to go to bed.

            “This has been the hardest day of your life,” I suggested to the dad.

            “I believe you’re right,” he said.

            And it was a day that could not end too soon.