The Sunday Letter
Eleven years ago this week, my father passed. I still count it in years, the way you count the age of a child, because part of me is still learning how to live in a world that does not have him in it.
Grief is a strange kind of weather down here. It does not keep a schedule. It comes in on its own wind, sometimes on the very day you brace for, and sometimes on an ordinary afternoon when a song on the radio or the smell of something cooking or a certain stretch of road brings him back so sharply that you have to stop what you are doing.
The memory I come back to most is a camping trip we took into the mountains, just the two of us. We drove the Jeep and four-wheeled across broken roads that barely deserved the name, and we slept by the side of a creek and ate whatever we could catch. If I could go back for even a moment, just to hike one trail with him and eat beans from a can by that water, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I think about those days more than he ever knew I would. They are the reason I still sometimes order the plain and simple thing at a restaurant when everyone else is reaching for something fancier. And they are the reason I try to be joyful, even on the hard days. My father was a joyful man, and he never once lectured me about it. He just lived it out in front of me, and it became an example I have spent the rest of my life trying to follow.
What I have learned in these eleven years is that a good father does not really leave. He goes on living in the things he handed down. In the way I do a thing without thinking, the way he showed me once and I never forgot. In the words that come out of my mouth in his voice before I even realize they were his to begin with. You carry a man like that with you. He rides along.
And the South, I think, is uncommonly good at this. We are a people who keep our people. We name our children after the grandparents they will never meet. We leave the porch chair where it always sat. We drive the long way past the old house just to look at it for a second. Down here the ones who came before us are not so much gone as folded into the place itself, into the land and the names and the Sunday tables, still close enough to feel.
That is part of why I love this part of the country the way I do. It does not ask you to move on. It lets you keep what you loved. A Southern summer is full of the people who are no longer at the table, and somehow that makes the table fuller, not emptier.
So if this week holds an anniversary for you too, a father or a mother or anyone you are still learning to live without, I hope you will let yourself feel it. Missing someone is just love that has nowhere to land for a little while. It is not a thing to hurry past. It is proof you had something worth grieving, and that is its own kind of blessing.
I miss my dad today. I am also grateful, all the way down, that he was mine to miss.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
There is a promise Jesus made that I have leaned on more than almost any other. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” — Matthew 5:4
It is a strange thing to call a mourner blessed. The world tells us the opposite, that the ones to be pitied are the ones who are hurting, and that the goal is to feel the loss as little as possible and get back to normal as fast as we can. But Jesus does not say hurry. He does not say pretend it does not ache. He says the comfort is coming, and He says it to the ones who are willing to grieve.
Because grief, in the end, is the price of love. We only mourn what we treasured. A heart that has never broken is usually a heart that never let anyone all the way in. So the tears are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are a sign that something went beautifully right, that we were given someone worth losing.
And here is the hope underneath the hurt. For those who trust Him, death is not the last word. It is a door, not a wall. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” — Revelation 21:4. The people we have handed back to God are not lost. They are ahead of us, and the parting is not forever.
A good father teaches you things while he is here. But the best of them teach you something in the leaving too, which is that love does not end when a life does. It only changes address.
So if you are carrying someone this morning, someone you would give anything to sit beside one more time, take heart. The mourning is holy. The comfort is real. And the God who keeps a light on for the ones still finding their way home is keeping one on for the ones who have already gone ahead of us.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.