This Is The First One Since We Lost Her

There is a chair, and everybody knows about the chair.

That is the thing you have been turning over. Whether to say anything. Whether somebody else will and you will not be ready. Whether to do the thing she always did, or leave it out, or do it and not mention why. Whether saying her name will start something in the room that nobody can stop.

And underneath all of it is a question you have not asked anybody, because there is nobody to ask: what am I supposed to do.

I do not have an answer for you and I am not going to pretend to.

What I can tell you is that there is no correct way to do this, and the reason that matters is that you have been assuming there is one and that other people know it. There is not. Families who have been through this are not doing it right. They are doing something, and then next year they do something slightly different, and that is the whole method.

So let me take one thing off you before anything else. Whatever you do on that day, you will not have done it wrong. You cannot. There is no standard, there is no one watching to see whether you handled it correctly, and there is no version of the day that would have made her less absent.

Jesus wept

There is a verse that is famous for being short, and what it is doing is not sentimental.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35, King James Version)

Jesus wept.

Read where it sits. He is standing outside the tomb of a man He is about to raise. He knows what is coming. He said so out loud a few verses earlier, to the sisters, in front of everybody.

And He weeps anyway.

That is worth staying with, because it dismantles something you may have been carrying. If anybody ever had grounds to skip past grief on the way to the good outcome, it was Him in that moment. He had the outcome in His pocket. And the grief still happened, in public, with no apology and no explanation, and the text does not treat it as a lapse.

So grief is not a failure to believe something. It is what love does when the person is not there, and God Himself did it standing four days from a funeral He was about to undo.

You are not required to be further along than He was.

You are permitted to weep with the outcome already settled, and it has never once been evidence of a failure to believe anything. John 11:35 puts the weeping in front of everybody with the resurrection already in hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that permission solid on a day you are dreading.

There is no right way, so choose one thing

Here is the only practical thing I have, and it is small.

You cannot get the day right. But you can decide one thing about it, and having one thing decided is very different from having nothing decided.

Because at the moment every part of it is open. Whether her name gets said, whether her chair is at the table, whether you do the thing she did, whether anybody talks about it. And an open question in a room full of people gets answered by whoever moves first, which is usually not you and is sometimes exactly wrong.

One decision closes one of those. Just one. It could be: we are going to say her name at the start, and I am going to be the one to do it. It could be: her chair is not at the table this year. It could be: I am not cooking what she cooked, and I do not have to explain that to anybody. It could be: if I need to leave the room I am going to leave the room.

You do not need seven decisions. Seven would be a plan for a day nobody can plan. One is enough to take the day from entirely open to slightly held.

You are able to decide one thing without deciding all of it, and the day has never once needed a plan to be survivable. The written word puts the weeping right in the middle of the story rather than tidying it away, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you while you choose the one thing.

Tell one person you decided it

So here is the assignment, and it is in two halves.

Decide one thing about the day. Then tell one person you have decided it.

The telling is what makes it real, and it also does something else: it means you are not the only person in that house who knows. On the day, when it comes to the moment, there is one other person who is not surprised, and that is worth more than you would think.

Choose somebody who will not argue and will not make it a discussion. You are not asking permission and you are not opening a family negotiation. One sentence: I have decided we are going to do this, or not do that.

And if what you decide is that you cannot decide anything yet, tell somebody that. That is also a decision and it is an honest one.

John 11:35 lets the grief stand in the middle of the account without resolution, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person says one true thing out loud about a day they are dreading.

You are able to say one decision out loud, and it has never once required you to have the rest of the day worked out. John 11:35 keeps the weeping in the text without tidying it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you and the one person you tell.