Crying At Somebody Else's Funeral

She checks her credentials every single time and she has done it about forty times now and she has never once passed.

The sadness arrives. It comes on its own schedule, usually in a car or at a sink, and it is a real weight and it is unmistakable.

And then, within about four seconds, the second thing arrives, which is a small clerk with a clipboard.

What did you lose?

Nothing. Nothing at all. She is not from either side of this in any meaningful way. Nobody in her family was involved in any of it. She has no ancestral claim, no stake, no personal connection whatsoever. She found out about it from a book at the age of thirty three.

So she puts it down. Every time. And the sadness goes wherever those go, and comes back in about a fortnight, and the clerk asks the same question, and she has the same answer.

She said to a friend once, half joking: I feel like a woman crying at somebody else's funeral.

And her friend laughed, and she laughed, and that is the whole of the conversation she has ever had about it with another human being.

Because the joke is exactly right. That is precisely the feeling. Standing at the back of something enormous, genuinely moved, and knowing that if anybody asked you how you knew the deceased you would have nothing to say.

You know that clipboard.

Maybe yours asks about something else. Maybe you have been embarrassed by your own tears at news that had nothing to do with you. Maybe you have a whole category of things you feel and never mention because you cannot establish standing.

Nobody trained you to do this exactly, and it did not come from nowhere either. It comes from being a decent person who does not want to take up space that belongs to somebody with a real claim, which is a good instinct and is doing something unhelpful here.

The shortest verse and who was in it

Here is a verse everybody can quote and almost nobody reads in context.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

He is at a grave. And the man in that grave is somebody He is about to raise, four verses later, which means He knew the outcome the entire time He was standing there.

He also had, on any ordinary reckoning, less claim than the two sisters standing beside Him. It was their brother. It was their house, their loss, their four days.

And He wept.

Not politely. The word used is a real one, and the people watching remarked on it, and their remark was: behold how he loved him.

You are permitted to weep at a loss that is not yours, and the shortest verse in the book is somebody doing exactly that. That is what John 11:35 records, tears at a grave by the one person present who knew it would be undone (John 11:35), and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that verse in three syllables, which is not the length you give a detail nobody was meant to notice.

And nobody in that scene asks Him to establish standing. Nobody says: you did not lose a brother. The question does not arise, and the reason it does not arise is that it is not a real question.

Where the clerk came from

Now let me deal with the clipboard, because it is not a random affliction.

You have watched people take up space that was not theirs. Everybody has. You have seen somebody make a bereavement about themselves, or a tragedy about their own feelings, and you found it distasteful and you resolved, somewhere below the level of a decision, never to be that.

That instinct is right and it is worth keeping. It is simply doing the wrong job in this instance.

Taking up space is a thing that happens in a room, in front of people who have a real claim. It is a public act. What you have been doing is being sad in a car, on your own, about something nobody in your life has mentioned in two years.

There is nobody to take space from. The room is empty.

You have not been taking anything from anybody, and there is no one whose grief you are crowding. Scripture says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory (Philippians 2:3), and read the operative word, done, which is about action in front of others, and it is the Holy Spirit who produces that restraint in a person, and He has not been standing in your car with a clipboard.

And nothing on this page tells you whose loss it more properly is either. You are not being ranked here, and no party is being named. The word says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and His Spirit is the one who makes that a place to rest rather than an unanswered question.