My Mother Will Not Be There

You counted the chair and then you took it off the number.

That happened weeks ago and it took about a second and nobody saw it. You were working out how many, and her name came up in your head the way it always does, and you added her, and then you did not, and you carried on with the arithmetic.

And you did not say anything to anybody about it, because what would you say. There is no sentence for that.

This article is for two women and they are in the same position by different roads.

One of you has a mother who died. The other has a mother who is alive and will not be coming, for reasons that go back years and that you are tired of explaining and that most people ask about wrongly.

I am not going to separate you, and I am not going to pretend the two are the same. They are not, and the second is often lonelier, because grief for the dead is permitted in public and the other kind is not, and people who would sit with you over a coffin will change the subject at a table.

What is the same is this: on the biggest day of your life, in a room full of people who love you, there will be somebody missing, and everybody will know, and almost nobody will mention it.

And what you have been doing, for months, is trying to work out how to feel about a day that is going to be both things at once.

Because you are looking forward to it. That is true and it is not a betrayal. And there is a stone in the middle of it that is not going to move.

You have been treating that as a problem to be resolved before the day. As though you have to arrive at one settled feeling, and if you cannot, something is wrong.

You do not. Both are true and both are going to be there, and the day is large enough to hold them.

Nigh unto them that are of a broken heart

There is a line in the Psalms about where God is, and it is a statement about location rather than about comfort.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.

Nigh means near. Close by. It is a word about position.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say the LORD mends them that are of a broken heart, in that clause. It does not say He explains it, or that He shows them why, or that He shortens it.

He is near. That is the claim, and it is smaller and far more useful than the things people say to you.

Because you have been offered a great deal of explanation. She is looking down. She would want you to be happy. God has a plan. Everything happens for a reason. Every one of those tries to make the absence make sense, and every one of them has landed badly, and you have thanked people for all of them.

This verse does not do that. It does not account for anything. It simply puts God in the room, close, with a person whose heart is broken, and leaves the brokenness undescribed and unexplained.

And there is one more thing in it worth having. The verse does not require the broken heart to be resolved before the nearness happens. There is no order of events in which you first get to a settled place and then He is close.

He is near to them that are of a broken heart. That is the state in which the nearness occurs.

So you do not have to arrive at your wedding having sorted this out. You can arrive with it exactly as it is.

You are able to arrive with it unresolved, and the nearness has never once waited for a heart to be mended first. Psalm 34:18 puts God close without explaining anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is near in a state nobody has tidied up.

Do not choose between them

Here is the practical part, and it is the mistake almost everybody makes on this day.

You will be tempted to pick one.

Some brides in your position decide to keep it entirely out of the day. No mention, no photograph, nothing, on the grounds that it would be a shadow over everybody else's enjoyment and that she would not want that. And then they spend the whole day with it running underneath, unacknowledged, taking energy from every conversation.

Others make it central. The day becomes substantially about who is not there, and the grief is given the main seat, and afterward there is a specific sadness about having spent the occasion inside an absence.

Both of those are attempts to make it one thing, because two things at once is uncomfortable and the human instinct is to resolve.

Do not resolve it. Give it a place instead.

A place is different from a theme. A place is small, specific, and bounded: this object, this moment, this one sentence. It says the absence is real and acknowledged and here, and it does not ask the whole day to carry it.

And the reason a place works is that unacknowledged things spread. If there is nowhere for it, it will be everywhere, quietly, all day. Give it one square foot of the day and it will mostly stay there.

You are able to give it a place rather than choose between two true things, and an unacknowledged absence has never once stayed where it was put. The written word puts God near to the broken without asking them to resolve anything, and the Spirit of God is the one present in a day that is holding two things at once.

One small way, and tell one person

So here is the assignment, and both halves matter.

Decide one small way the missing person will be present, and tell one person what it is.

One way. Small and specific. Not a speech and not a moment in the ceremony where everybody has to feel something on cue.

Her handkerchief in your sleeve. Her ring on a chain. A photograph on a side table where you will pass it, not on the top table where everybody must look at it. Her recipe as one of the things on the table. The flower she grew. Two minutes on your own in a room at four o'clock.

Choose one. That is all. And if you are marrying without a mother who is alive, the same instruction holds and it may need to be more private, and that is not a lesser version of it.

Then tell one person what it is.

That is the half people skip, and it is the one that does the work. Because if nobody knows, you spend the day quietly carrying a private significance that nobody can see, and it costs you. If one person knows, then at some point in the afternoon somebody's eyes will meet yours across a room and you will not be alone in it for that second.

One person. Not everybody. Somebody who will not make a thing of it.

You are able to give it one place and let one person know, and carrying a private significance alone has never once been the same as holding it well. Psalm 34:18 puts the nearness right beside the broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one present at four o'clock in a room with somebody on her own.