What remains

Today I attended the burial of a child. It is a bitter, hard thing, the death of a child. It is especially so in modern America, insulated as we are from the brutalities of history and the depredations in much of the world. We are not accustomed to burying our children, any more than we are accustomed to the thunder of approaching war or the desperate ache of searching for clean water and a scrap of food. We have outgrown the world and history and forgotten much about suffering. Perhaps this is why we have also drifted from God.

But sometimes the fallen world finds even us, and so we get ourselves used to a wheelchair or fend off memories of a rape or gather with friends beside a narrow slit in the earth into which we will lay the body of a baby.

I am thankful it was a body. Something I regret, after our own child died, is that we had her body cremated. We didn't know any better. We believed the body is just a shell, that all she was had passed into Heaven. We practiced a sort of cognitive dissonance, believing both that the human body is created in the image and likeness of God and that it is a temple, and yet also believing that the totality of the person is spiritual, that the body is a sort of machine or dwelling place.

And so we gave her over to be burned to ashes. This was not always a practice accepted by Christians. But like so many other things we have forgotten the old ways. There was a time when the body was considered sacred, even after life had departed from it. But economic pressures and influence from pagan cultures led us to convince ourselves that cremation is acceptable. It's certainly cheaper today than burying a body.

I am glad our friends chose to bury their baby's body, to refrain from doing violence to that precious creation so fresh from God. There is something right, I have come to believe in the years since my daughter's death, in treating the body that remains with reverence. It is right to place it into the ground in faith that it will be raised up, that our physicality is part of who we are, that we are more than just spirit-children briefly inhabiting fleshly husks.

It is a hard cruel thing, closing the lid on your child's coffin. What no one tells you is that in the months and years to come, people will forget, but you will not. Something in you has died as well, and it awaits resurrection with your child's body. You will carry this hole in you all your days, and there are no words or heavenly equations to make it good, not so long as you breathe while your child does not.

My wife and I cannot tell our friends this yet, because it does them no good to know it. But we were able to tell them how deeply we regretted cremation, and now we thank God they heard us. You ponder every second you had, questioning if you could have done something differently while your child was living. To lose someone close to you is to wrestle forever with regrets. At least they will be spared this regret, which is no small thing. But still there is the long dark road ahead. Pray for them.