Beyond understanding

Twice in recent times, immediate neighbours and friends have experienced the devastation of arriving suddenly and unavoidably at one of the life-moments all parents hope never to experience; they have been brought to the very edge.
They have been confronted with a long free-fall into an abyss where all understanding, all peace, and all stability are shredded into an ungraspable and meaningless haze: a mist that thickens as certainly and as unstoppably as water finding its own level, until their very existence has become as a void within a drained and crumpled shell.
A muffled and slow-motion quality overlays the inexplicable continuation of day-to-day activity in the world around them.
How can people be carrying on as though nothing has happened?
Surely the whole world knows and everyone else is hurting too?
How desperately alone we can feel in our grief.

There is no going back.
They have found themselves in a new place from which there is no return.
Little did they suspect that the desert experience of Lent would become so very real.
Little did I that I would be brought back to thoughts of such edges so soon, or in such a way. (1st January post)
Both have lost a son.

Marlene and Roy continue to endure their loss through the sudden and (at first) inexplicable death of their son Darren.
Theresa and Peter, whose son Andrew died two weeks ago, are still lost in that abyss.
While the world looks like a wilderness to them, the long and slow process of healing will seem unlikely to begin; but even within their pain I see the trust - and even joy - born of faith, refusing to be beaten down and trampled in the mire of their grief.
Their awareness of God’s presence is what makes the difference; the smallest touch prevents their loss sliding into total desolation and despair.

From conception to death these sons’ lives have been lived.
They came to the world through their parents’ love and have now returned to the source of their being.
With every birth and every death we are reminded of the eternal links between the two, and the following words of Carlo Carretto express the wonder that is life in a new-born child, and also the root cause of the grief felt by parents whose expectation would have been to predecease their children.

'If we wished to sum up the relationship that should exist between man and God, if we wished to give as exact an example as possible of the trust on which the peace of those who live in the mystery of God depends, we could not do better than point to the infant sleeping in the strong arms of its mother, close to the womb of its being, safe under the watchful eye of the person who gave him his existence and who thought of him before he ever was.’ ...

'When a father gazes into the innocent eyes of his son, he will, if he looks carefully, see the mystery of the infinite, of the unfathomable, of the ungraspable. He will feel that even though this little body belongs to him, because it was born from his blood, it comes from a distant world, from infinity, from God. God created him at the very moment when man desired a son, and in the unity of love saw him as it were issuing forth from the chaos of non-being. For an instant man has shared in God's creative joy and has touched the infinite.' ... ( from 'Love is for Living' )

May they, and all departed sons and daughters rest in peace.
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