Sad brightness/ bright sadness

We helped bury a baby last night.

On Bright Monday, the very day following the year’s most joyful feast, an expectant mother in our community went for a routine prenatal sonogram, only to learn that her baby, 20 weeks along in the pregnancy, had died.

Incomprehensible. Unfathomable.

We gathered at the cathedral at 9 o’clock , then processed across the street to the cemetery, following our priests and the icon of the Resurrection. No pallbearers needed but the father alone, cradling a heartbreakingly small coffin in his arms. He and the mother were acccompanied by their three young sons, the youngest only a toddler himself.

After some prayers the father placed the little coffin in it’s grave. We sang Paschal hymns of the Resurrection and filed past the grave to toss in our handful of earth. Simple, even minimal of necessity; what oration or sharing of stories could their be for a child unmet and unknown in this life?

But the child was known to God, and now is with God. He had a name, and was accorded the full and proper dignity of personhood as he deserved. What more than that need there, could there have been? It sufficed.

In the ongoing infanticide of abortion, and the growth of single- or two-child families, experiences such as this must be increasingly rare. I have two sisters and a brother, and I remember mother telling us that she had miscarried three times, once between each of us four. When you look at the tired faces peering out of old family photos from earlier generations, you realize that it wasn’t only tiredness from raising six, eight, ten or more children, but the emotional and spiritual costs of coping with the much more frequent occurrences of miscarriage and infant mortality.

Christ IS risen, He HAS trampled down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowed life. “Memory eternal!” little Lazarus… in God’s memory is our life eternal, and we will meet you right soon enough in the fullness of time.

[The title of this post is from Fr. Alexander Schmemann's book Great Lent].

Right: The cemetery of St. John’s, with the golden cupola of the St. Sergius chapel visible through the trees