On the Loss of a Father

I sat in the front pew of the church at my dad’s memorial service. Before me, on my right, was the choir loft in which my dad had sung for many years. I remembered the vivacity with which he spoke about upcoming choir performances, difficult offertories to be sung in worship, and—when he had taken up the violin in earnest again—his part in instrumental numbers. As I looked on the choir loft, I noticed his absence. When I closed my eyes, I could hear the tremble of his bass voice from the back of the choir. I could hear that it was missing.

I wept when I thought about his missing voice. It would be missing from my life, missing from phone calls and conversations.

We stood up to sing “Amazing Grace.” (I should be accurate here: I stood up and the congregation followed my example. I understand why the congregation was not asked to stand for any hymns at the memorial service, but you can’t sing “Amazing Grace” sitting down. You just can’t.) As I mouthed the words with trembling lips and a tongue stilled by emotion, I noticed something. My dad was in the choir loft again. But now, rather than a single voice singing bass in accompaniment to the ten or twelve other folks in the loft, I heard my dad as part of host of angels. He had joined the heavenly choir that sings “Amazing Grace” into eternity and back. Of course, it’s the place where he belongs, having sung and played Christ’s praises in faith for most of his life.

Then there was a new mourning, and a new weeping that came over me. It was the mourning not of those who have no hope, but the mourning of hope. For to be exposed to the truth that Jesus brings the faithful children home upon death is to be exposed to the equally potent truth that I am not yet home. Pain came no longer from the realization that Dad was not with me; pain now came from the realization that I am not with him. He is experiencing the fullness of life in Jesus Christ, and I am not.

Academics refer to something similar in what is called the “already/not yet” problem. In the Scriptures we see Jesus announcing God’s kingdom as having arrived, and the disciples witness his resurrection. But evil still exists in the world, and we do not yet experience the New Jerusalem as it will be when Christ returns. At my dad’s memorial service I found myself caught between the life I have—which mourns the end of my dad’s life on earth—and the life I will have but do not yet have—of which he already partakes. The reverse of this phenomenon is what someone once called “realizing that you’re on deck”: that is, when your parents die, you realize that you’re next. There’s no more generational buffer between you and the inevitable stilling of heart beat and breath.

But my sense in the pew was not an anxiety borne of fear. It was an anxiety—an agitation—borne of expectation. I will be there, singing with him and the hosts and all the generations of the saints; but I am not there yet. And my absence for this world is terrible. Let me be there now, Lord, rather than here! Suddenly having patience—a trait that seems to have a genetic origin in Dad and me—with God is difficult. I am left on this side of the great divide, to wait.

So I wait, with only one thing to do between Now and Then. Oddly—in an uncanny twist that would make the hosts of angels smile—that thing to do is precisely what Dad had a gift for doing. It is to serve.

Praise be to our Lord Jesus Christ, who teaches us to serve in such a way that we may be prepared to sing with the choirs of angels some day!