Angry messy grief

I don’t do funerals. I don’t grieve ceremoniously or corporately. When I grieve, it’s messy, and there’s no make-up involved, but there usually are a lot of cigarettes. So this weekend I’ll be going to a wedding, not a funeral. Not because I’m running away, but because I’m facing what must be faced in my own way… with my iPod turned up as I chase five hundred miles of highway in the opposite direction of the funeral. And this weekend I will laugh and I will shed tears and I might not be sure why, or which is which at any given moment. But that is my mourning.

My uncle’s words, written mere hours after losing his wife:

“Where do I stand now? I am DEFIANT! I hate cancer and all other sickness now more than ever. I expect divine justice to give me back seven-fold or more in healings what I have lost tonight. I am even more determined that what I saw tonight, droplets of blood spraying from Vicki’s nose and mouth as she breathed her last breath, was not God’s will – it’s what Jesus died for in our place. I will not make peace with the enemy of eternal life (sin) or with the enemy of physical life (sickness) and call it God’s will. I will call it mystery – the secret things of God that I do not understand (Deut.29:29), but I will not accept it as some heavenly ‘status quo’."

Until I read these words I had nowhere to place the anger I feel in response to this – yet another – monstrous hit to my family. I tried to place it on God, but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t escape my belief that he is good. And so I carried it until the truth of these words pierced me. Now I see clearly that I am angry towards an enemy which is constantly present yet already defeated. I am angry at this disjointed world, operating contradictorily from the way it was meant to. I am angry because I’m stuck in a temporary existence and it hurts, and I long for the eternal fulfillment my aunt stepped into last night.