Every Day Is the Same Day Now

Somebody asked him last week whether it was getting any easier and he said yes, because that is what you say.

What is true is that it is getting flatter. That is a different thing and there is no word for it, so he has not tried. The days have stopped being days. They are one substance now, gray, and one is exactly like another, and Saturday is not different from Tuesday and the difference between morning and evening is only the light.

It is eight months. His wife died in the spring after a long illness and the arrangements took about six weeks and then everybody went home, correctly, and he has been in this room since.

He gets up. He eats something. He goes out sometimes. He is not neglecting himself and he wants that on the record because he has seen how people look at a man in his situation and he cannot bear being looked at that way.

But there is nothing marking anything. For thirty-one years the shape of a day was two people making it together, and one of them made most of the shape, and now there is a room and an afternoon and the afternoon does not end so much as go dark.

Anybody eight months into something like this knows exactly this and mostly cannot say it. And I want to say now: no system. No routine for grief, no stages, no plan. A man in month eight does not need to be organized. And I am not going to tell him it gets easier either, because he has been told that by nine people and it has not helped once.

A time to every purpose

Let me put down a line that gets read at funerals and is almost never read as what it actually is, which is a statement about structure.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.Ecclesiastes 3:1

That is not primarily a comfort. It is an assertion that time has joints in it. Ecclesiastes is written by a man who has looked hard at how meaningless everything can seem, and one of the few things he will state flatly is that time is not an undifferentiated smear. It has kinds in it.

Which is exactly the claim a man in month eight cannot make from the inside. His experience says the opposite: one substance, gray, no joints anywhere. And the text quietly insists otherwise, not as a mood, as a structure of the world that does not depend on whether anybody can feel it.

You are living inside time that has seasons in it whether or not any of them are visible from where you are standing. That is not a soft word for a man in an armchair. It is what is written in Ecclesiastes 3, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a living room in the late afternoon. The days feel identical. The structure is God's and it is still there.

And notice how blunt the list is that follows. A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, and the writer does not put them in an order anybody has to move through. He states that they exist. He never once tells a reader to hurry into the next one.

You have never been told by that chapter to move on, and it names the mourning as one of the real times rather than as a delay before one. Ecclesiastes 3:4 is the text this sits on, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old and unsentimental book land in a man on month eight.

Nothing here is going to hurry him

Now the part this category exists for.

There is no timetable being handed out. Eight months is not late. There is no schedule for this and the people who imply there is have generally not been through it.

And I want to name the specific thing that has gone, because I do not think anybody has, and naming it is worth more than sympathy.

He has not only lost a person. He has lost the thing that made his days different from each other. She was the calendar. Not in a diary sense: in the sense that the shape of a week was made by two people, and most of the marking was hers, and when she went the marking went with her.

That is a second bereavement and nobody sends a card for it.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.Psalm 30:5

That verse is often used to hurry people. It should not be. Notice it does not say how long the night is, and it does not ask the weeper to do anything at all.

You were never asked to shorten the night, and no verse anywhere puts a length on it. Psalm 30:5 is where the word puts it, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man be in month eight without an accusation attached.

You are held right now, in this chair, in an afternoon that will go dark rather than end. It is written that there is a time to every purpose under heaven, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a man whose days have all become one day.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly what the afternoons are like. Grief at eight months is exactly when people stop asking and exactly when it is often heaviest, and being held by God has never been a reason to sit in that room alone.