Standing on the Step With a Dish

The dish is heavy and he has had it in both hands for about four minutes, which is long enough that his arms have started to complain.

It is a good dish. He made it properly, the way his mother made it, and it took most of the afternoon, and it is still warm through the cloth.

Their daughter was nineteen. It was eleven days ago.

He rehearsed three sentences in the car and he can no longer remember the order of them and he is fairly sure the second one was a mistake anyway. There is a light on in the front room. There is a car in the drive that is not theirs, which means somebody else is already in there, which makes it both easier and much harder.

He has been on this step for four minutes.

He is not a shy man. He runs a team. He has spoken at his own father's funeral. What has him fixed to a doorstep is a very specific fear, which is that he will say the wrong thing to two people who have already had eleven days of people saying the wrong thing.

Behind that is a worse one, and it took him three days to admit it to himself: he does not want to be near it. Nineteen years old. He has a daughter. Some part of him has been managing the distance since the phone call and standing on this step ends the managing.

The dish is getting heavy.

Sit down here for a minute before you knock. There is one instruction for this and it is three words long.

Weep with those who weep

Here it is, and notice that it is not an instruction about speech.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.Romans 12:15

There is nothing in that about saying anything. It is a command about company and about the direction your own state goes when you are near somebody, and Romans 12:15 is worded that way rather than as an instruction about speech, and the Spirit inspired the wording.

And it is a command, which is worth noticing, because it means the thing being asked of you is not a talent. Some people are naturally good at this and most are not, and the instruction was given to a whole church rather than to the ones with a gift for it.

You are being asked to be there rather than to say something. Romans 12:15 tells people to weep with the weeping, and the Spirit inspired an instruction with no content requirement in it at all.

That is the answer to your three sentences. You do not need them. If you never say anything more useful than the dish, you will have obeyed the verse.

The second fear

Now the one you had to admit to yourself, because it is doing more work than the first.

The distance is the point. Nineteen years old, and there is a daughter in your own house, and something has been keeping a careful gap since the phone call.

That is not cowardice and it is not a failure of love. It is what happens in a person when a grief comes near enough to touch something they cannot bear to think about, and everybody in that street is doing some version of it, which is why the two people inside that house are finding that most of their friends have gone slightly quiet.

Naming it does not remove it. What it does is stop it operating in the dark.

You are not disqualified by wanting to be somewhere else. Nothing written anywhere requires a man to feel steady before he obeys, and the Spirit is not waiting for you to be comfortable with a nineteen year old dying before He will use you on a doorstep.

Knock anyway. The reluctance is going to come in with you and it does not have to be resolved first.

And there is something worth knowing about the eleven days. The first week of a death is crowded and the second one empties out, which is when most people go back to their own lives and a house gets very quiet. Day eleven is not a late arrival. It sits right about where the visits stop and the actual year begins, and somebody knocking then is worth several people who knocked on day two.

Once the door is open

Here is the practical part and it is mostly about staying.

Hand the dish over. Say his name, or her name, whichever of them opens the door. Say your daughter's name too if it comes, or do not.

Then sit down. That is the whole of it, and it is the part people skip because it is uncomfortable. Most visitors deliver and leave inside four minutes, and the leaving is often driven by the visitor's discomfort rather than by the family's need.

Decide before you knock how long you are staying, and make it longer than feels natural. Nothing written anywhere puts a limit on it, and the Spirit works in the part of a visit that happens after the useful things have run out. Twenty minutes with somebody else in the room is not the same as twenty minutes on your own with them, so if the other car leaves, stay.

You have permission to be useless in there. What is written asks for weeping alongside rather than for a contribution, and the Spirit is capable of using a man sitting on a sofa with nothing to say.

And if they talk about her, let them, and do not move it on. That is the single most valuable thing in this whole piece.

And expect that to be harder than it sounds. When a bereaved parent starts talking about a child, almost everybody in the room does something to move it along, and they do it out of kindness, because they think the talking is hurting. It is not. Being unable to say her name in her own house is what hurts, and the person who lets that run is doing something almost nobody else in that street will manage this year.