Gone from My Sight

Dear readers, if you ever met someone crying, what would you say to that person? I am asking this question because only early this year my neighbour’s four year old toddler Dayo, was able to handle this difficult situation.

We all live in a sixteen semi-detached flats estate, where Dayo and his parents shared walls with an elderly man who was widowed recently in October, 2014. The man had thrilled anyone he could “bother” for a conversation with stories of how he married very young, and had lived with his wife for over 50 years. They had only one child a girl, who is married with kids residing in the UK. The sudden death of his wife had left him quite devastated.

The death of one’s spouse is one of the most painful of losses, and is often fraught with negative consequences. “Nothing will ever be the same,” he told me. “I feel dazed, frightened, and unprepared to face these new challenges by myself;” he would add. I had no other words than to tell him; “All would be well.” But on this fateful day, Dayo was playing in the courtyard of their twin flats when he saw the elderly man weeping on a bench. The small boy instinctively left his games and sat down beside him, clasping the man’s wrinkled hand warmly with his own soft little hands. I was watching all this from my apartment window, and was quite moved by the sight, and when the old man bade his younger friend goodbye, as the evening cold was starting to get harsh, I called out to Dayo and asked him, “What did you say to your neighbour?” “Nothing, Uncle,” was the reply. “I just helped him to cry.”

Isn’t it nice to hear that a small boy was able to do the right thing at the right time? An adult like myself would probably have waited ‘for the right moment’; he or she would have first considered what words to use, and would then have said them feeling very uneasy and embarrassed. Children, on the other hand, have firsthand knowledge of frailty; they still have to learn to hide it. This is why Dayo was able to comfort the old man so easily and spontaneously.

If we believe that God looks lovingly upon our frailty because, each one of us is “precious and honoured in His sight,” then it is easy to understand that to comfort the grieving is one of the most important things we can do.

Everyday opens with the memory of our dear departed, a memory that fills us all with longing and a certain amount of pain. However, the remembrance of those who are no longer with us is celebrated by us as believers in the light of that eternal destiny which God has reserved for all Christians, a future in which we will enjoy the wonderful existence which can’t be faintly compared with the live we are living now. And so we can see dying as the journey into love without measure, a journey where we return whence we came, to have the same love lavished on us that is lavished on Jesus. Death is, in actual fact, a wonderful voyage into never-ending light, as Charles Henry Brent (1862 – 1929) reminds us:

What is dying?

A ship sails and I stand watching

Till she fades on the horizon,

and someone at my side

says, “She is gone.”

Gone where? Gone from my sight,

that is all; she is just as

large as when i saw her.....

the diminished size and total

loss of sight is in me, not in her,

and just at the moment

when someone at my side

says “she is gone,” there are others

who are watching her coming,

and other voices take up the glad shout,

“there she comes!”.....and that is dying.

To remember our dearly departed means to live in the awareness that human life is fleeting and fragile, yet illuminated by hope, because after all, at the end of our life’s journey, “a new earth and a new heaven” awaits us.

“What did you say to your neighbour?” I asked Dayo. “Nothing, Uncle, I only helped him to cry.”

And what would you say to those who need to be comforted?