Fifty Years And Nobody Has Seen All Of Me

She is seventy four and she worked it out at a funeral, which is where a person works out most things about their own life.

It was a good funeral. A woman she had known for thirty years, and the eulogy was long and warm and specific, and person after person stood up and said something true.

And she sat in that pew and thought: they knew all of her.

And then, before she could stop it: nobody is going to be able to do that for me.

Not because she is unloved. She is not. There would be a room full, and every one of them would mean it, and they would say lovely things, and each of them would be describing about half.

Because she has run two lives, side by side, for fifty years. Not deceitful ones. Not secret ones exactly. Just two, in two places, with two sets of people, held apart by a decision she made at twenty four and has never once revisited, because by the time revisiting it occurred to her, it would have cost more than she was prepared to pay.

So there is a set of people who know one half completely and have no idea about the other, and a set who know the other. And there is nobody. Not one person on this earth, not a husband, not a sister, not a friend of forty years, who has the whole of it.

She said out loud, in her car, in a cemetery car park, at seventy four: I am going to die and nobody will have met me.

You know that thought if it is yours.

Maybe you are not old and it has arrived early. Maybe you have started noticing which conversations you are running out of chances to have. Maybe you have thought, at a funeral, in exactly that pew, about who would speak and what they would not be able to say.

There is nobody to blame in this. She was twenty four and doing her best in an impossible arrangement, and the decision she made was reasonable, and fifty years is simply what happens to a reasonable decision that never gets looked at again.

Somebody old wrote this down

Here is a psalm written by somebody who was old and frightened, and it does not pretend to be anything else.

O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation.Psalm 71:17-18

Read what he is afraid of. Not death. He never mentions it.

He is afraid of being left before he has finished showing something. Until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation. That is a man with a thing in him that has not got out yet, and he is old, and he is asking for time.

And notice what he does with the fear. He does not go and organize anything. He does not make a list of people to speak to. He says it to God, plainly, using the words old and greyheaded about himself without embarrassment, which is a thing most people cannot do at seventy four.

You are held by somebody who taught you from your youth and has not stopped, and the fear you carried out of that funeral is written into the songbook by somebody your age. That is what the psalm does by naming old and greyheaded in a prayer (Psalm 71:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that particular fear in the book so that a woman in a cemetery car park would find it already said.

The one who has always had the whole of it

Now here is the thing that the funeral could not tell you, and it is not a consolation prize.

There is somebody who has the whole file. Not half. Not the version either room got. All fifty years of both, simultaneously, in full, including the parts you have never described to anybody because there has never been anybody to describe them to.

You have been fully known for the entire fifty years, and there has never been a day when only half of you was visible. Scripture says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off (Psalm 139:1-2), and it is the Holy Spirit who searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), which is the same knowledge turned on a person and never once turned away.

And this matters more than being eulogized well, though it does not feel like it in a pew.

A eulogy is a summary given after the fact by people working from fragments. Being known is a continuous condition that has been true the whole time you were alive. One of those is a paragraph and the other is a relationship, and you have had the second one for fifty years while grieving the absence of the first.

What this page will not do to you at seventy four

I am not going to tell you to go and put it right.

Nothing here says you should sit somebody down. Nothing here tells you to make a phone call, write a letter, tell your sister, explain yourself to a room, or spend the years you have left doing repair work on an arrangement you made at twenty four.

You may want to. If you do, that is entirely yours and it might be very good. But it is a choice and not a debt, and a page has no business handing an old woman a task.

You have not been left with unfinished business, and nothing about the end of your life is waiting on a conversation. Scripture says now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not (Psalm 71:18), which is a prayer and not a to do list, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a companionship at seventy four rather than a deadline.

You do not owe anybody a full disclosure, and nothing about the end of your life has to be tidied before it is allowed to be good. The word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that gentleness to a person, and He has never once handed a seventy four year old a project as the price of peace.