When Grief Turns to Ashes and Dust

JOURNEYS punctuated with action, interrupted by cautious waves of numbness and courses of seasons of disregard; life, in all its fullness, is incomprehensible. Grief spends us up faster than the humdrum life, but it also advances us in the passage of growth and learning. We would hardly expect that life might throw us this curve ball, but it has. We pick up the pieces the best we can.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Resonating words, and, as they punch their way into our psyche, we recoil.

Sometimes our words fail the resemblances of depth that the gravities of life deserve. And much of the time in many situations in life nothing can be done. Acceptance is the best place we can arrive at.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust admonishes us to a reality we can only but accept; but accept with grace and sadness — to allow the fullness of grief to attend itself to us as pain does.

As precious persons make their way from our grasp and what was is now no more, a profoundly confounding presence overtakes us. Yet acceptance helps. Knowing earth has passed and ashes and dust have gone full circle in the context of one life, we do wonder for eternity. We can no longer touch them as we ever would like. And we worry for the vagaries of our memory. We don’t ever want to forget them or even any little though significant detail of them.

When grief turns to ashes and dust we have travelled the whole vexing circle from loss to grief to acceptance. Our grief is at last found itself in ashes and dust; a life it had itself is now, for the worst part, gone.

Grief ought never to extinguish our life.

The ashes and dust of loss is the momentousness of grief.

The ashes and dust of grief is acceptance of what cannot be changed.

When grief turns to ashes and dust, as it must ultimately must, we’ve had God embellish our journey with depths of being we couldn’t manufacture otherwise.

There is something cogently real about a funeral, and about the grief that surpasses all reconciliation. If only, as human beings, we would spend more time in this serious space. We would benefit no end from learning what otherwise passes us by.

Grief prepares us for the weight of glory in eternity.

In eternity there will be no more denial or lies or falsehood or turning away. In eternity everything will be touched by truth and light.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.