Spiritual Sunday
I wrote Friday about the anniversary of my eldest son’s death but there’s something else I want to say during this Easter season. In his last year, Justin became a charismatic Christian. He died the Sunday after Easter after having attended, in the space of 24 hours, three services at three different churches, including the Episcopal church he grew up in. Then, just before leaping into the St. River’s River from Church Point–a place where he had gone swimming as a child so it should have been safe, only that day there was a rogue current—he kissed the cross that stands there. Reports tells us that he was bubbling over with joy, as though filled with the holy spirit, so flinging himself into the water had a baptismal dimension to it. What it all means beyond that, I do not know.
I find consolation in the Clare Harner Lyon poem “Immortality, which I am encountering for the first time. It reminds me of the Percy Shelley passage from Adonais that we put on Justin’s gravestone:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
Here’s Lyon’s poem:
Immortality
Do not stand
By my grave, and weep.
I am not there,
I do not sleep—
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle, autumn rain.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift, up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight,
I am the day transcending night.
Do not stand
By my grave, and cry—
I am not there,
I did not die.
Julia and I remembered Justin by rowing out on the lake by our home and scattering flowers. We also spent some time in one of the coves, reading Mary Oliver poems amidst the yellow irises. We were visited by a deep peace.
