The wake

My grandmother's wake was today.

I didn't know most of the people there and I wonder if that's a bad thing. From the people who were there, I wonder how many of them knew my grandmother. I get that colleagues and friends to my family want to show their support and offer condolences, but I don't see why they have to do so by watching my little cousins cry. Some of them even came to greet the body.

Another thing I don't understand is why the person who led the service had to select such strange texts and songs. The tale of how Lazarus died because Christ was two days late in coming didn't cheer me up. A plea for God not to abandon his followers, even when put to music, is not my idea of offering comfort to a grieving family.

I've never seen my grandfather look so small. He never was a tall man, like my mother's father was, but I grew up thinking of him as a rock of a man, unmoveable and strong. Now the woman he loved is gone and all he has to show for it is a house full of her things and a pacemaker. It seems like an unfair trade.

My parents argued in the funeral home after the strangers had left. My mother thought someone had been forgotten. My father said she would have come if she wanted to. I just sat there and felt uncomfortable.

My grandmother has been dead for over a week. It seems cruel to say, but it shows in her body. It still has the same proportions, but the skin has sunk down and dried out, and where I expected the soft, faded contours of my father's mother, I just saw the harsh lines of a corpse. If it weren't for exams in the family, she would have been buried sooner, before all her children and grandchildren had to witness the start of her fading from this world in the physical sense.

I'm still not sad for losing my grandmother, my godmother, for being a little more alone in this world. I am very sad to see my family hurting and to find myself with only two hands and two arms to contain all that pain. I can hug one person, hold the hands of two, maybe speak comforts and distractions to a third, but my family is much bigger than all that. One husband, five children, thirteen grandchildren... I feel utterly helpless as I watch them all grieve.

And rather than take comfort in the faith that meant to much to her, I am livid at the church. Not once did anyone say she was in a better place. All I heard was that we will join her when it's our time to die, and that it's important to believe in God. That's not comfort. That's propaganda. Perhaps the burial service will be better, but I am dissatisfied with what I saw today. I want to scream at the priest for not being there. I want to shout at someone for hiding away the songbooks and making us sit in vague discomfort as a choir of elderly ladies sang about walking in darkness. I want someone to take over the work of my aunts on the verge of tears, but none of the volunteers stayed after the service was over.

I wish I was back in Norway and could ask my host father, a Lutheran priest, why faith in Belgium is so cold to me when it's warm and alive in a church not my own and a country so cold it hurts to breathe in winter.