This morning I was standing at my bathroom mirror putting on make-up, when an older Steven Curtis Chapman song came on Pandora. 

Instantly I was transported back.

We’ve all head those moments right?  When a smell, a sound, a touch, or a taste sends us back to a specific time and place and we almost relive the experience again.

For me it was to my cousin Garrett’s funeral.  It was the background music as we watched the photos capturing his short life.  Snapshots of his infant face scrunched up, his first smile, his first step, his first birthday, bike, game, football, etc.  All the firsts marched across the scene, but ending before all the firsts were even met.  The fun photos were there, the prankster in training, the loving child, the naked toddler bum beneath the cowboy chaps and gun holster.  The heart-wrenching photo of Garrett with our Grandfather (who had been gone for nearly 7 years by this time) with their love for each other and us a nearly tangible thing. 

The pictures kept coming.  Hauling with them that infuriating mix of emotions; the laughter, the joy, the sadness, the ache, the regret, and the anger.  It all just kept rolling over the room as tears and laughter mingled into the sound of shared grief.

Under it all were those amazing words. 'We can say goodbye with hope."

It has been years since the song has stirred the same visceral reaction that it did that day.  Yet this morning it did.  I think it may have been powerful today because I heard it in a slightly different way than I have in the past.

Does that happen to you?  Do you know why?

I don’t know.  I am grateful, but I don’t know what made the difference this morning, or really even WHAT that difference was.  I just know it was different somehow.

It could have be knowing now a different reality of hopes and dreams that could never be.  Maybe it is having a better grasp on questioning God’s plan and WHY terrible things happen. Perhaps it is seeing the wonderful men that his brothers have become and wondering what he would be like, and exactly how much the lurking shadow of grief has helped shape them. 

Truthfully I am not sure what this post is about.  Is it about my cousin?  Is it about me and how the deaths in my life have shaped me?  Is it about how grief never stops it just morphs into a new phase? Is it about the way life seems to loop around and bring us back to the same places (figuratively or literally) with a new perspective. 

I don’t know. 

I just know I heard a song that took me back.  And it was different, and somehow new.

And it was so very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Curtis Chapman: "Say Goodbye With Hope"  This link will, I hope, take you to a youtube video of the song.