Yesterday I came back to my office with the need to express a very simple and very heartfelt lament. “Why does everyone have to die?” It’s a lament as old as my first memory of death, when I was four and saw my mother crying on the phone as she heard the news from the States about her mother’s passing while we were living in South Africa. I remember going to the funeral in Beloit, Wisconsin and dropping my matchbox car by accident into the hole they had dug for my grandmother and all of the tears came forth in this more tangible experience of loss for a four year old.

We ache anew with the fresh losses that come, and come, and each new one presses on the rest like old bruises. And we have also found after each one that something new comes again in the landscape of our being.

My 3 yr old son has been fascinated with volcanoes recently (hashtag parenting in times of disaster?) and we’ve been reading a book “Gopher to the Rescue: A Volcano Recovery Story.” While so much of the landscape is devastated by the volcano’s eruption, gopher is digging and surviving and is the protagonist in the recovery of the ecosystem after the eruption, aerating the soil, providing shady spaces for emerging frogs and salamanders. It’s a beautiful story of what happens in a landscape after huge loss. And it’s been giving me hope. And I thought of that gopher, and about the resilience of our hearts to emerge anew after every loss as I read what Maya Angelou has so beautifully articulated in this poem. So I offer this to you with a word of solidarity – this is hard and disorienting, and the same healing that has carried us through before is carrying us through even this.

When Great Trees Fall
By Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

May you be well and supported today and may the blessing of God or all that sustains you,
keep you safe, grant you peace and fill you with all that you need, just for today. Amen.

– Rev. Joel Eaton