A while back, I posted “One and Many,” in which I said that it seems to me all disturbances, whether interior or exterior, can be traced to a misapprehension, a “disconnect,” between one and many, between oneself and another or others. (Sometimes, the disconnect is interior, but that’s not the subject here.) When that happens, one must—with the help of grace—locate the disconnect in order to understand it and thereby restore the peace that is missing (pun intended).

Recently, my uncle passed away. My aunt, whose very substance is Christian devotion to her husband and family, almost never left his side throughout his agony of terminal cancer. She phoned me regularly during his illness to keep me informed on his condition; I had to remind her to take care of herself, not just of him. I was unable to attend the funeral; old age has given me, among other things, spinal arthritis, and I was in the middle of a major flare-up. My presence wasn’t missed—there were hundreds in attendance. He was a much-loved man, whose humor, simplicity, goodness and wisdom drew everyone who knew him.

I know his absence has not yet fully arrived. That will come later, when everyone is gone and she’s alone, but even then—in that vague occasional ache of simply missing him—she’ll still be all right. He will still be present, not really absent, because the bond remains. She phoned me the day after the funeral to tell me about it. She was surprised that she was all right. There was no “wailing grief.” Why not? I was reminded of my own experience after my mother died, and of St. Edith Stein’s memoir, in which she recalls the period prior to her conversion to Christianity. She was profoundly affected by the equanimity, the peace, with which a Christian friend responded to the death of her husband. She knew the Christian belief in immortality, but that seemed an insufficient explanation. She was right; it is insufficient. It has more to do with the nature of Christian love than with Christian beliefs.

The pain of the physical sundering had already occurred during my uncle’s illness. She knew—as I knew, during my mother’s illness—that he was dying. All her consciousness was focused on him, she spared none for herself, for an awareness of the grief of parting that she was actually undergoing. Christian love is self-sacrificial in nature, rather than self-indulgent. The Christian lover is unaware of self, only aware—often acutely so—of the beloved. She had already endured her grief, though she was unconscious of it at the time. Even as he endured the Cross, Christ’s prayer was for us, for his own beloved. His love is the prototype of all Christian love. There is no “disconnect,” strange as it may appear to non-believers.

It may be that the “wailing grief” is for those who know they’ve lost their chance now, the time they were given, and the freedom, to choose to love, rather than only to be loved. (It’s always a choice, and never a mere circumstance.) The disconnect is irreparable now—and that is indeed an occasion for grief. Even then, however, we are not without recourse. In his mercy, God gives us another chance: forgiveness.