Cry If You Want To

Last week we buried my Father-in-law. As losses go this wasn't so bad. I have been down this road before and the familiarity of the surroundings was strangely comforting. 11 years ago I encountered my first major loss. My Daughter Kadi died at 9 weeks gestation. I found this to be tremendously disorienting and i was LOST - completely lost. How could God allow this?!? Parents aren't supposed to bury their children. What kind of God allowed children to die? The questions where sincere, often self centered, and usually of incoherent logic. I guess grief is like that.

My second loss was part of the normal order of things. One year after Kadi died my Opa (grandfather) died. I am the eldest son of an eldest son and had a great relationship with my Opa. The grief was intense but understandable. This was a completely different experience than Kadi's death. Yet oddly the grief was more intense. There is a permission to grieve a grandparent’s death that is not granted to a parent grieving the miscarriage of their daughter. As i immersed myself in grieving my Opa's death I found myself rehearsing and reliving my grief over Kadi. It seems that grief is cumulative and that sometimes one grief only begins to find resolution in another grief.

It was during this second grieving that I discovered this song, its lyric is powerful and its music is healing.

Cry If You Want To by Holly Cole

Cry if you want
I won't tell you not to
I won’t try to cheer you up
I'll just be here if you want me

It’s no use in keeping a stiff upper lip
You can weep you can sleep you can loosen your grip
You can frown you can drown and go down with the ship
You cry if you want to
Don’t ever apologize venting your pain
Its something to me you don’t need to explain
I don’t need to know why
I don’t think it’s insane
You can cry if you want to

The windows are closed
The neighbours aren’t home
If it’s better with me than to do it alone
I'll draw all the curtains and unplug the phone
You can cry if you want

You can stare at the ceiling and tear at your hair
Swallow your feelings and stagger and swear
You could show things and throw things and I wouldn’t care
You can cry if you want to

I won’t make fun of you
I won’t tell any one
I won’t analyze what you do or you should have done
I won’t advise you to go and have fun
You can cry if you want to

Well it’s empty and ugly and terribly sad
I can’t feel what you feel but I know it feels bad
I know that its real and it makes you so mad
You could cry

Cry if you want to I won’t tell you not to
I won’t try and cheer you up
I'll just be here if you want me; to be
Near you
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I think that maybe this should be Psalm 151. I find that Christian communities often fall short of their ideal, and certainly fail to live up to the expectations of scripture. But if you wanted to ask me for a description of a church that I would consider being faithful to the witness of Jesus its a church that includes this song as one of the great hymns of the faith.