Steve

I learned last night that I lost a friend last week.  His name was Steve and he'd been in my bible study for nearly two years.  We'd bonded over both having lived in Louisiana for a spell and swapped hurricane evacuation stories.  He was quiet, reticent even, and did not share much of his life.  But he showed up at 7pm most Tuesdays to share a bit of the Bible and our group prayed for him weekly.

I wish that I could say his death was a complete shock.  I'd feel better about that.  But he'd appeared ill for a long time, a subject I broached once or twice but didn't press as he always claimed to be fine, only tired.  I do not know how Steve died, but I know he'd intended to keep whatever battle he was fighting private and I suppose, even in death, he was successful.

The memorial today was very small.  His family drove from out-of-state, just the four of them, and expected to remember Steve alone.  Steve's mom called a friend from Steve's phone, however, and that friend called me.  So the four of Steve's family were joined by four of Steve's friends, still a quiet group but Steve would have appreciated the symmetry.  We prayed together, said the Lord's prayer, shook hands and gave hugs, told small stories. All what people do at such things.

But what struck me, and what always strikes me at funerals/memorials, is how impossible it is for me to fathom standing in a room like that, with those tears and that heartache, without God.  Steve hadn't told his parents about his bible study.  When his father met me he wondered, tearfully, if that was because Steve worried his parents would disapprove of his being involved in a non-Catholic group.  But his father just said how happy he was to know Steve had been reading the Bible, what a comfort it was to find a Bible in Steve's condo, how any father would just want to know their son was seeking God.

I cannot begin to imagine the loss of a child.  The only thing I can vaguely imagine would be if I lost my brother or my sister, the two people who, even moreso than my parents, understand every intricacy of my past and present.  And I would mirror Steve's dad's words on that point.  It would matter so little to me what roads and missteps and explorations led them to God, as long as I could trust that they got there, that they believed, that they recognized Truth.  The priest at the service today echoed that sentiment, knowing that Steve had begun attending a protestant church, focusing on the steps of Steve's journey (parents who baptized and raised him in the church, a personal exploration of God that led him to study other Christian beliefs) and stating that the joy of that journey is that it sought God. Not Catholicism.  Not Protestantism.  The God of the Bible. The God whose death and resurrection we just celebrated.

And it was not lost on me (nor on anyone in that room, I imagine) that at the time of that Easter celebration, when I was singing of a Wondrous Cross in a wooden pew 3 blocks from where I sit now, Steve was singing, too, next to his heavenly father.