There is nothing like holidays to bring the dead back to us vividly because holidays are family celebrations and the holes in our families show up clearly at these times. The empty chairs, the missing voices, hugs, and kisses, remind us of what we once were as a family and won't be again until we all are together where there are no longer any tears or separations.
Yet the dead stay with us in a wholly new way. Sr. Joan Chittister says "People return to us after they die - not in body but in essence. Then we see most clearly who they were." (in "A Month of Memories.") Novelist Elizabeth Goudge, in "Pilgrim's Inn," says the same thing a little differently: "Death has a way of wiping out hatred. And it does more than that; it increases understanding. It's queer, but after people are dead, you find that you understand them better. There's a poem that says, 'What the dead have no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead.' Perhaps that's true."
Why is it only now that I can see most clearly who my beloved dead were in my life, what they gave to my life? It seems that, like diamonds, the facets of their personalities, their lives, are lit by God's Light for me to see at different times, even different years of my life. My father died over forty years ago. But it seems as if I never understood him in poignant depth until I reached the age he was when he died. Now I've outlived him by ten years; yet with each year I realize more and more how he affected me and still affects me: my ideals, my tendency to workaholism, my sense of responsibility as firstborn since I am also firstborn.
Since my sisters and I grew closer during the time of my Mom's final illness and death, we've talked more about our growing-up years and shared our differing memories of our parents, the different impact, for good and ill, they had on each of us. Again I gaze at the different prisms of who they were for my siblings, and a new awareness of both their gifts and their human frailties emerges, a deeper understanding of them as individuals and as a married couple.
Yet knowing they are dead, I also know the most important fact about their deaths: they died to be transformed. Who they are now is the essence of their beings, the good that I remember enhanced beyond my understanding, their frailties burned away in the fire of God's passionate gaze of love. This Essence of who they are is what speaks to me now, in the depths of my heart where God dwells and where they dwell with Him. For heaven is unity with God. Where God is, the dead are, in incandescent, joyful Aliveness. They are what we will be. We carry who they are within us and, if we can forgive them for the ways they failed us and forgive ourselves for the way we failed them, our dead and us can remain together in peaceful loving awareness. We can quietly and continually celebrate the gift of their lives. We can continue to live with them in comfortable familiarity. Because we live in hope. The hope that we will see them again.
Honoring the dead and knowing they are still with us is a universal human trait, across all cultures. Alexander McCall Smith has written many novels about an African woman, Precious Ramotswe, first woman detective in Botswana ("The NO. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series). Precious still misses her parents, who are both dead, "late." In the most recent novel, "The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine," she visits their graves and reflects powerfully on who they were and are for her:
"A few hours later she was on the way to Mochudi, following the road that she knew so well. Not far from the village, this road took her past a small burial ground, a short walk from the road, and she stopped and made her way to one of its corners. There she found the two graves that she had come to visit: the grave of her mother, lost to her when she was not much more than a babe in arms, and that of her father, the late Obed Ramotswe. She had erected a new stone to him a few years earlier, as the old one had been knocked over by a donkey and had split across the top.
"Obed Ramotswe, A citizen of Botswana, A much-loved husband and father, now with the Lord forever. That was all it said, but it was enough. It might have said Great Judge of Cattle; it might have said Miner; it might have said Witness to the Birth of a Country of which he was so Proud; but it did not, for the words spoken by stone may be brief and to the point, and yet carry so much weight.
"As was the custom, above the graves there was a small canopy, a tattered piece of canvas that she renewed every so often, stretched across a rectangle of metal bars that supported it. This provided shade for the sleepers below, and showed that they were still loved by those who kept their shelter there.
"She touched this, then took a step back, wiped away her tears, and went back to the van. It became no easier as the years went by. People said that it would; people said that you forgot late people after a few years, that you forgot what they looked like and what they said; but they were wrong - she was sure of that. She had never known her mother, but every detail of her father was etched in her memory - the old hat he wore, the way he looked at her when he spoke, the things he told her about his life. She would never forget all that because it was now part of her, as familiar to her as the weather."
When our lives are saturated by faith, hope, and love, we cry for our beloved dead every day, and we give thanks to the Lord for them. God is so good! God gave our dead to us - we still remember their eyes, their voices, their hats, their jokes or shyness, their cookies or lasagna or beer, the warmth of their embraces. We give thanks to the Lord Who is so good, because we will see them again. In the meantime, we carry them within us, speak to them about our lives, ask for their prayers. Now they are part of us, in an indescribably intimate way. As familiar as the weather.