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We visited your grave today. There was a fine mist that fell like 1000 kisses from heaven all over my upturned face. Was it you? Was it God? Either way I was not alone anymore. I felt connected to the heavenlies and asked God to let you look down. I reached toward the sky and whimpered your name.
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I imagined my tears falling onto the earth that covered you, but they clung stubbornly to my face as if even they were reluctant to touch the unnatural resting place of an 18-year-old boy. I wiped a tear and placed it on your gravestone anyway.
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My fingers traced your name and felt the cold raised numbers of your birth date. I remembered the day that God gave me a boy. And such a boy!
Your broad shoulders, your long lanky limbs and your strong jaw with a cleft chin. But it was your bright blue eyes I missed the most.
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God gave you and God took you away.
But away is also Home.
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God, can You take me too? I don’t feel like I belong here anymore.
How can I ever go back to normal when my reality has been completely rearranged?
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I hate carrying this scream around. On the outside, life is booked with everyday necessities but on the inside there’s a quiet knowing where my real home is, and a wondering when I’ll finally get to go there.
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If I have to stay here, let it count for something. I can’t waste Tristan’s story. I know too much now, things I never wanted to know, and things I never knew I could know. Like, how pain can cleave you in two and only God can put you back together again. How He fashions you into something you never wanted to be but somehow it’s better because He’s doing the holding together.
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I’d rather be broken and held together by God, than in one whole piece by myself.
It’s true, pain is a cruel master, but in God’s good hands, pain is what clears the mist that hides His face.
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We left your graveside and drove back to the house. On the way home we stopped at a diner, the kind you would have liked. Gravesites and diners. Tear-stained pillows and grocery lists. Fading memories of you and checking email. This is our world. These things are so incongruous that it makes me carry a scream.
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I can’t wait until the world is as it should be on the New Earth. There will be no graves for tears to drench. There will be no graves at all! Will you gallop with me through the fields where no tombstones lie? Will you skim the seas with me knowing there are no more goodbyes? Whatever God has planned for us, at the very least we will be together. My Tristy-wisty one, and I.
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Dear God, I’m getting more impatient. Please use Tristan’s story for your glory. Help me to wait on You no matter what comes, but please come quickly. Trace his left eyebrow for me and tell him it’s from his mom. In Jesus name, amen.
