Under the Piano

Some dear people in our acquaintance recently lost their 36-year-old daughter to an aneurism.   It was obviously unexpected.  Aneurisms do not send notice. 

To:  Mrs. Happily Unaware

       111 Oblivious Way

Dear Mrs. Unaware;

A representative of our conglomerate will be calling on you at . . .

Remember that old movie device where someone on a city sidewalk would be struck by a falling piano?  This particular family seems to be perpetually under the piano.  I know we live in a fallen world and bad things happen, even to very good people, and God is good.  I know and believe He is good.  Still I wonder why some are such piano-magnets.

I haven’t spoken to this family.  I haven’t written a note.  I know I should.  Words, after all, are “my thing.”  On this instance, however, the muse has been silent.  What a crock of cop-out.  But it is true that I don’t know what to say.  Even the sweet truth that God is faithful, a truth that they know through experience far better than I, sounds like a platitude at a time like this.  Still, it is the only comfort there is. 

What I would like to say is that it has all been a horrible mistake.  That their daughter is not gone.  That she’s just been vacationing in some small Amish village where there is no cell service.  That she will be dropping by soon to hug them and collect her three children and return to the life she had been living on Oblivious Way until last week when she went to bed Unaware and they thought she had slipped away to Heaven.  She had really only slipped away to Iowa, and the Heaven journey is scheduled for later.  Much later.  After they have gone ahead of her.  Because parents should never outlive their children.  Never. 

Of all of life’s blessings, children are by far the best.  And of all losses, this is by far the worst.  While this sweet family would not deprive their daughter of Heaven, would not snatch her back to this hard life after the rest she has found, they would give anything and everything short of their souls and their other children to turn back time and somehow change this before the fact. 

This family is already under the shadow of another piano, rocking in the wind and worrying at its fraying strap.  Let us pray for them.  Let us pray for one another without ceasing.  In the end it is really the best we can offer one another.  In the end, we are all under the piano.