Every year June 21, the longest day, is shortly followed by the anniversary of my son's death from cancer, July 17. We all have anniversaries like these, when we remember--maybe with hard-won peace, maybe with brought-to-your-knees pain--the day someone we love began their eternal walk with God. These are the people who matter to us both in their presence and in their absence. They are repositories of love wherever their bodies lie.
The very strong memories of my son's last days begin their march to the foreground on the Summer Solstice because in our side-yard sits the cast-iron sundial my son and his wife gave to my mother, their first gift to her as newlyweds. She kept it in a garden next to the creek behind her porch. Six years later cancer took them both, she at 82 and he only 33.
This year we were at Stonehenge just a week before the Solstice. We weren't there at sunrise and it wasn't the longest day, but it was a reminder of the turning of the wheel as the earth's axis tilts at its closest point from the sun. Awe and curiosity might be the most common emotions in the presence of these stones. But I also felt the movement toward my heightened annual pangs of loss and thanksgiving. Who hasn't had these?
Like Stonehenge, my precious marker is both clock and calendar. But for me the time it marks is liminal. The young man it recalls is eternal. The promises it keeps are strong. The way the sundial sat as a sentry to my mother's leafy nook, it sits next to our side door, wed to the moss at its base. I haven't moved it in the 18 years since my father said, "Please keep mama's sundial."
The grandchild born just days after the death of her father will be 18 herself soon. When we lose someone, new life often follows. That's the way it is. New babies, new relationships, new blessings follow even the hardest parts of being human. We never stop living until our own sun sets. And even then, the wheel keeps turning.
What I am writing is not confined to any one age. The insights, if there are any, are ancient. When you see a site like Stonehenge, built during the Neolithic period, or Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Machu Picchu in Peru or others I haven't seen as well, the message is continuity. "There is nothing new under the sun," saith the preacher. "What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again." (Ecclesiastes 1:9) This may or may not seem consoling. But I tend to think that, as Godly wisdom, it is. Others have been where we are now. God has been where we are now. We are not alone. Never alone. AMEN
