"Yes, Jesus Loves Me!"

Unbidden, almost three decades past the morning his mother and aunt could not awaken him, Philip Anthony Clark lying still in his child-size coffin appeared unbidden in my memory's lens.  I paused in the contrived busyness of most of my days, tried to shake the memory, but couldn't.  Usually at these rare times when thoughts of Philip won't exit my mind, I've learned the art of distraction.  After all, I'm creative and inventive, or at least that's what I've trained myself to believe.  

When Philip died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS, American culture paid little, or scant, attention to the matter of dying, death, or its aftermath. America's response to death typically manifested as a mishmash of religious and secular practices.  Whether or not family and close relatives qualified for "paid-time leave," determined the degree that death had entered corporate boardrooms.

Not only was I unprepared for Philp's death; no one close to us was either.  Unspoken "do's and don'ts" proliferated.  Family, close friends, and colleagues quickly learned never to mention Philp's name or his short tenure on Earth to, or around, me.  Consequently,  countless others grieved or mourned mutely his death in the best ways we could. I don't know why I blamed myself for negligence that didn't exist. I had seamlessly assumed the mantle of "Gramma in Chief" after his birth when Philip's mother decided to attend college hours away from our Denver home. 

No consequential matter, Philip and I never missed a well-baby appointment in his abbreviated life! And we did everything together. He became my "road dog" in a car seat.  Philip died before he'd mastered the long and short hands on a clock; even so, he always knew when I was late picking him up from the sitter.  On the ride home, he pointedly looked out the window while I pleaded my case and apologized!

Dr. Angie, a personal friend with whom I occasionally golfed, released me from an imposed purgatory two years after Philip died.  We sat at the "19th Hole" after a Saturday morning round of golf, and for some inexplicable reason, I recounted the story of how Philip's mother and aunt had found him dead in his crib early one summer, Sunday morning.  (I needed to buy breakfast cereal and milk for Philip before getting him ready for church. When I returned from the store a short time later, a small crowd had gathered near my front door).

"I've told them not to leave the baby alone," I fumed to myself.  It was only after I''d skidded into a parking space that a sense of foreboding overtook me.  A neighbor I never particularly liked greeted me with, "Oh, Dorothie! I'm so sorry but the girls just found Philip dead in his crib." OH! OH! NOOO! I silently screamed.  

Then and from there, shock and denial became the companions that marked, mocked, and marred my life.  A year later on the anniversary of his death, I took multiple boxes filled with Philip's life out of storage and left them in the parking lot for a nonprofit to pick up.  Just as resolutely, I kept the silent screams silent as I buried memories and memorabilia, like his favorite book, It's Not Easy Being a Bunny, away.  Buried too deeply to be exhumed.   

You know what seeing Philip with his pacifier still half-in and half-out his mouth means, don't you," Dr. Angie asked.

"No." 

"It means he didn't suffer, " Dr. Angie explained. "He simply inhaled but couldn't exhale," she confided.

"OH!"

Only then did I exhale; still, I zombie-walked through decades of life, never feeling fully exonerated.  Was that why, on this particular morning, the flashback of Philip in death had shocked me so? But wait! For the first time, this time, "Yes, Jesus loves me," hummed in my head.  It was the only song  I'd chosen for his Homegoing Service. 

"Jesus loves me, this I know.  For the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to Him belong.  They are weak, but He is strong.  Yes, Jesus loves me!  Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! For the Bible tells me so."

I stored no memories of Philip's funeral and burial. I did, however, bury indescribable pain that eventually resounded as generational mourning.  I knew nothing about grief or mourning, really.  I knew grief happened, but little else. But the remembered image of Philip in his little casket shouted at me: Grief lives! Grief accumulates!  Grief competes and seeks to overwhelm, to conquer! Grief Is!

I had failed to hold grief at arm's length.  I had viewed grief as discrete, with a beginning middle, and end,  standing alone and bereft.  Not so!  I'd try to contain grief as if it were a landfill, one located on the outskirts of a small town.  I thought I could pretend; I didn't expect I'd have to tend it!  Yet over time, grief demands more and more territory.  Grief layers on top of itself,.  Always cumulative, it spreads; whatever the loss or condition, grief piles upon itself, by blood, circumstance, or happenstance.  

Overwhelmingly,  grief never forgets or yields.  Centuries ago, John Donne exclaimed, "Any man's death diminishes me..."  Grief rules as a harsh taskmaster that exhausts, enervates and often mutilates.  Finally the process of grief, or grieving never really ends. Like the great expanse of an endless ocean, grief ebbs and flows, often bringing grace with it, and a certain kind of peace.  

"Peace, peace, be still," the old hymn advises. Peace be still.  'Cause grief just is!