Broken Things
Sometimes broken things just stay broken.
When I was about ten years old, I woke up late on a Saturday to a note saying I needed to put on my boots and get to the barn to help my parents work cattle. Even at that age, it was clear that I was not cut out for farming, and I dreaded each time I had to try. But even a bad farm hand is expected to pull his weight, and I knew I’d be in trouble if I didn’t get it in gear. If I was going to eat breakfast, it had to be fast. So I reached for my pink cereal bowl.
Understand me when I say that this was no ordinary bowl. My pink cereal bowl was an icon of my childhood. It was a heavy ceramic bowl that my mom probably got from saving stamps at the local grocery store. Too small for cooking and too big for soup, it was the perfect size for kids cereal. I don’t remember for sure, but my guess is the first meal I learned to make for myself was Cocoa Puffs and milk, mixed together in my pink bowl.
But as is often the case in boys of that age, my attention shifted too quickly from the bowl on the counter to the cereal in the cabinet. By the time I realized that I’d set the bowl too close to the edge, it was already too late. My pink bowl was falling toward the olive green linoleum, and my little arms were too short to catch it. I watched the impact and heard the crash. Even though it all seemed surreal, I couldn’t deny what had just happened.
My pink cereal bowl, along with a not-so-subtle memorial note from my mother.
I was too old to cry. I cried anyway.
Nothing could change the reality though. All that was left for me was to gather the shards and set them on the table, hoping that my mom could put it back together and knowing all the while the she couldn’t.
You would think that such a powerful emotional memory would give me a clue as to what awaited me in adulthood. Somehow, it didn’t. Even now, as I close out my fifth decade on this planet, I’m still shocked at how much of adult life is consumed by navigating grief and loss.
In my house, we talk about such things more than most families. My wife Denise just completed her Doctor of Ministry degree with an emphasis in loss and grief. She has a coffee mug depicting Kaitlyn Doughty (of “Ask a Mortician” fame). Our dish towels are decorated with skulls in the style of Día de los Muertos. We’ve watched so many movies on death and grief that the Amazon Prime algorithm constantly lists such films in the “Recommended for You” category.
If anything, all this awareness of the grieving process has heightened rather than mitigated my experience of loss. When all the research and wisdom of years tells you that there is no easy answer, no quick fix, no clear solution to suffering, there’s no comfort left to be found in the American grief management enterprise.
The ancient community that gives us the biblical book of Lamentations knew better than to think they could shortcut mourning. Everything they had--their homes, their families, their economy, their identity, their sense of God—was destroyed in a matter of weeks in a war they could not win. To read Lamentations is to hear the funeral song for an entire people, to feel their utter despair and disappointment with God and the universe and whatever else might be responsible for our expectation of a moral order. The book isn’t for the faint of heart.
You might expect Lamentations to end with a proclamation of hope, some pithy old saw like “God is in control” or “There’s a reason for everything.” It’s the kind of thing people say to mourners when their grief becomes inconvenient, a way of cutting off the conversation and walling out that unsettling notion that whatever happened to them could just as easily have happened to me.
Lamentations doesn’t have time for such BS. Rather, it rounds out its song with a pointed question toward the Almighty:
20 Why do you forget us continually;
why do you abandon us for such a long time?
21 Return us, Lord, to yourself. Please let us return!
Give us new days, like those long ago—
22 unless you have completely rejected us,
or have become too angry with us.
And that’s it. No cheery optimism. No bible-verse tattoo. Just questions. Why have you abandoned us, and is it always going to be this way?
Lamentations answers that question not in words, but in form. Each of its chapters is an acrostic poem, with each verse starting with the next of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The pattern is repeated five times, but ultimately it ends. The alphabet doesn’t go into infinity. You can keep repeating it, but only if you’re always starting over. Suffering may not be linear, but neither is it forever.
My mom resorted to heroic measures to save my pink cereal bowl, and she did, sort of. I could pour cereal in it now, but milk would leak right through. Still, I’m glad I have what’s left of the bowl. It’s a loss, but an incorporated loss—one that is part of my story now in a way that’s meaningful, but no longer painful.
Other losses aren’t so easily dealt with. I can’t fix that reality, any more than I can fix the grief itself. But I can witness to the hope that, with time and love, what is shattered can be, if not mended, then redeemed.
As songwriter Leonard Cohen famously said, “There are cracks in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Sometimes broken things just stay broken.
Sometimes, it’s the brokenness that makes them beautiful.
