On a whim…

On April 27, 1959, my grandmother Wilkerson died.

I traveled with my parents to a church in Snellville, Georgia. I was not admitted into the building. I remained in the car — a black Ford coupe — parked on gravel beneath open windows.

This was the second death of my childhood. My grandfather Powell had died in July of 1957. I remember more of him. He was sixty-four. She was eighty-six. I was too young to understand death’s permanence, but I felt his absence. I also felt, without language for it, the fracture between him and my mother, and her refusal of affection toward the woman who became his companion after divorce. Even as a child, I sensed something torn.

But my grandmother Wilkerson’s death was different.

It was my first existential crisis.

From the sanctuary, across the gravel parking lot and through the open windows of that black coupe, a hymn drifted toward me:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee;

Let the water and the blood,

From Thy riven side which flowed,

Be of sin the double cure,

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.

In films, that hymn is often reduced to shorthand for naïveté — a prop for simplistic faith. But it was nothing of the sort to me.

I was a boy sitting outside a church, trying to locate my grandmother inside those words.

Where is she?

And by extension — where is he?

That question has never left me.

Now, more than sixty years later, I sit in church again. It is Lent. Deaths have layered themselves over time, one pressing upon another. Each carries weight.

But there is one whose weight eclipses the rest.

Beth.

Her absence is not historical. It is immediate. It still crushes me.

The boy in the black Ford coupe asked, Where is she? about his grandmother.

The man in the pew asks the same question now.

Where is she?

I weep for her.

And yet, in ways I do not fully understand, I sometimes experience her not as memory alone but as presence. Not as an “It” confined to the past, but as Thou — to borrow Buber’s language — encountered in moments that are unsummoned and enlarging.

I fear wishful thinking. There were long years — decades — of silence. I know what absence feels like. This renewed sense of nearness feels fragile.

But here is what steadies me:

When I sense her presence, I do not become smaller or more withdrawn. I become more loving.

If it were fantasy, I suspect it would narrow me. Instead, it opens me — toward patience, toward tenderness, toward others.

If love reduces the dead to memory alone, then death wins twice.

I am not ready to grant it that victory.

The boy is still listening through open windows.

And even now, I think I hear the hymn.