Good morning…

My friend’s daughter fell in love and is planning a June wedding. I was drawn to a strange mother-of-the-bride gift. A small hardback book about a missing cat (my friend loves cats), the death of a mother (my friend misses her beloved mom), and what wisdom we learn from seasons of loss. As she prepares for her only daughter’s wedding, why did God coax me to give my friend a book about cats, grief, and loss?

Before I wrapped the gift in the passenger’s seat on the way to the engagement party, I transferred these poignant words from the book to my journal.

“In Mexico they say when someone you love dies, a part of you dies with them. But they forget to mention that a part of them is born in you – not immediately. I’ve learned, but eventually, and gradually. It’s an opportunity to be reborn. When you are in between births, there should be some way to indicate to all, ‘Beware, I am not as I was before. Handle me with care.’

In the spring after my mother died, a doctor wanted to prescribe pills for depression. ‘But if I don’t feel,’ I said, ‘how will I be able to write?’ I need to be able to feel things deeply, good or bad, and wade through an emotion to the other shore, toward my rebirth. I knew if I put off moving through grief, the wandering between worlds would only take longer. Even sadness has its place in the universe.

I wish somebody had told me then that death allows you the chance to experience the world soulfully, that the heart is open like the aperture of a camera, taking in everything, painful as well as joyous, sensitive as the skin of water.” (Cisneros and Hernandez’s Have You Seen Marie? p. 89-91)

Again, “Why, God, this gift for the mother-of-the-bride?”

Because on some crucial level, the new husband’s gain will be my friend’s loss. We are told in Genesis 2:24, For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. If God has His way, my friend will die to holding the top spot in her daughter’s life this June. As Richard Rohr wisely says: “Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.” And if death allows our heart to open like the aperture of a camera, I want to encourage my friend to take lots of pictures of each one of her emotions, the painful as well as the joyous.

As Jesus says, “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal” (John 12:24-25, MSG).

…Sue…