My sermonette for blogs4God is here. It reflects my thoughts as of 3:30 am when I decided to put my insomnia to use and write something. I suggest reading it because I refer to it later in the entry. 🙂

The Recounting of my Day
Church was OK today. Bill preached one of his better sermons and I was sitting with some of my choir peeps. I really focused on worshipping today and mixed some Episcopalian liturgical movements in with the Lutheran stuff accidentally. (Then again, Jon’s parish is a Lutheran church that worships like a Catholic one.) After church, we went home and had lunch and I changed into my visting hour clothes.

Visiting hours were actually somewhat enjoyable. There were lots of people there, which meant that the room was unbearably hot. Jon decided to “work the room” so I ended up in the receiving line by myself. G greeted me with a big hug and was pretty OK with everything. His wife J let me hug her too. F was calm, though I think the reason was that there were people around. After talking to the family, I talked to some other people from church and also to one of the couples I met at the hospital. I then went back to the church and did some paperwork before going back over at 4:30 to grab Jon. While I was over there, Bill pulled me over and asked if I would be the crucifer tomorrow. (For you non-liturgical types, the “crucifer” is the person who carries the pole with the cross on it in the procession into the church.)

We returned home and I changed clothes to go out shoe shopping before the Lions service. (D was a member of the local Lions club.) We ended up not getting anything but earplugs for the burial tomorrow. (Jon isn’t fond of 21 gun salutes.) Jon attended the Lions service and I printed resumés and cover letters. We went to get the car washed because I’m driving in the procession tomorrow and came home.

The Reflective Part of This
The b4G thing I wrote this morning was really an exercise in getting my feelings out without sugarcoating them. I was weepy as I was writing it; but writing it helped me to get a lot of the pain out. I also didn’t expect it to be posted so fast — I thought I’d edit it first; but editing it would have sugarcoated things. Basically, I wanted to say that my call is to love God’s people even when it hurts and it was hurting emotionally to know that some of my people were in pain.

Something that has been good about this whole experience is that I’ve learned how I grieve and what I need to have in place to cope with my grief. I know that attending the funeral will bring some closure; but I didn’t know how much the calling hours mattered. Many of G’s co-workers were at the early ones (I didn’t attend the later ones) and I think that it made a huge difference. Talking things out with my small group leader’s son T was also immensely helpful because he also sensed that D’s death wasn’t like the others. T has played in the Easter brass quartet with G for years, so it hit him (T) hard for that reason — it hurts that someone else is hurting.

My mother-in-law reminded me last night that C.S. Lewis commented on how similar grief is to fear in A Grief Observed, which I had to read in stages because I would start crying after about 20 pages. For those who want to know what utter grief is like, read the book — it’s his reflections after the death of his wife Joy and believe me, he does not sugarcoat things.

For those of you who are worried, I am doing OK — I’m crying when needed and I know to bring tissue to the funeral tomorrow. I’m not weeping too much (maybe 5 times this week) and I’m starting to eat again. I’m blogging every thought on these subjects because it helps to clear my mind.

Now to go attempt to put together a non-skanky funeral outfit… (Most of my black clothes are winter ones and the summer ones are a bit risqué — shirts that expose my navel and all.)