Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Parting is all we know of heaven
-and all we need of hell.
                 Emily Dickinson

But if Becky's death, for her, meant fuller life, for her parents, for all of us mourning a loved one, death means a terrible emptiness.

Some years ago, I sat on a bench in a waterside park in Singapore, watching grade-schoolers performing acrobatics.

"My son," the young woman next to me said shyly as a small boy scrambled to the top of a human pyramid.

A new group ran onto the field and my bench mate turned to chat. Though Singapore's population is Chinese, the official language is English. Where was I from? she asked. America. Did I have children? Three, I told her, all with families of their own. Which one did I live with? Not with any, I said. Then where did I live? Well, my husband and I lived in New York. Scott's family was in Nashville, Donn's in Miami, Liz's near Boston.

"Nashville ... Miami ... " she struggled with the unfamiliar names. "Are they very near your street in New York?"

They weren't in New York at all, I explained. Liz wasn't too far, I went on, a five-hour drive. But Nashville was over a thousand miles away and Miami nearly fifteen hundred.

On the lawn, little girls were somersaulting over one another with wonderful precision. When I turned back to my companion, I was startled to see tears in her eyes.

"So far! So far!" she cried. "Oh, when will they be back!"

Through this warm-hearted stranger I got a sudden look at modern American life as the anomaly it is in human history. I saw John and me forever packing suitcases for too-brief visits. Most family highlights - a son's music gig, a grandson's big baseball game - happening where we cannot be.

In tiny Singapore, where you can't go fifty miles without leaving the country, the generations live side by side in a pattern old as humanity. In our huge and restless country, the pattern is broken. I thought of my grandparents in Florida and California while I was growing up in New York. Thought of my own grandchildren's first steps, the first words, all of which I had missed. Thought of all the missing parts of ourselves, the empty, aching places a mobile society won't even let us acknowledge. And I too started to cry.

Passersby may have wondered why a young Chinese woman and a middle-aged American were weeping, arms around each other, on a bench in a public park. But I knew. We were grieving for a sorrow old, too, as humanity We were grieving for the ache of separation.

Death of course is the ultimate separation. The words we substitute for "dead" say it nonetheless. Absent. Passed away Departed. It's a departure so final that many cultures resist it, keeping the dead physically close, including them in the round of daily events.

One of the memorable times of my Indonesian trip was a visit to Tana Toraja. These mountain people on the island of Sulawesi bury their dead in niches carved high in the limestone cliffs. In one sheer rock face, Caroline, Alan, and I counted a score of these alcoves. The height of a man, two feet deep, and as much as sixty feet long, they were fronted with wooden railings like balconies on a tall apartment building.