When Morning Comes...
The Quiet Grief that Lives Between Forgetting and Remembering
I told you about the nights, but nobody really warns you about the mornings. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect the morning might actually be the harder of the two.
At night, at least, you know what is coming. You learn that the dark has teeth, that the quiet begins to grow loud somewhere around two in the morning, and that the other side of the bed will be cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. Night is difficult, but in a strange way it is also predictable. After a while you begin to recognize its rhythms, and you can brace yourself for it.
Morning is different. Morning sneaks up on you. It arrives in that fragile space between sleep and waking, that thin moment when your mind has not quite caught up with your life yet. For just a moment, maybe half a moment, you forget. And then you remember.
That remembering, every single morning, carries its own kind of loss. It is a small grief inside the larger one, like being told the news again, quietly and without ceremony, just long enough to knock the wind out of you before the day has even properly begun. Nobody warns you about that moment, the brief forgetting followed by the sudden remembering. It might last only ten seconds, but it can feel like the loneliest ten seconds of the whole day.
Eventually you get up anyway, because what else is there to do. And once you do, you begin to notice that morning has its own geography of grief.
The coffee pot is usually the first place it appears. If you spent years sharing life with someone, the coffee pot seems to know the story before you do. It is still set for two. You may find yourself reaching automatically for two mugs before your hand stops in midair. Or you make a full pot because that is what you have always done, and now half of it goes cold on the counter.
The bathroom carries its own quiet ambush. His razor still rests on the shelf. Her robe still hangs on the hook. You have not moved them yet, partly because moving them feels like a decision you are not ready to make, and partly because leaving them there allows you to pretend, just for another day, that nothing has changed. The problem, of course, is that leaving them there means you see them every single morning.
There is no good option, only the one you can manage today.
The chair at the kitchen table that nobody sits in anymore. The second toothbrush. The voicemail you have not deleted because it still carries her voice, and you are not ready for that silence yet.
Morning is full of objects that used to mean nothing and now mean everything. Over time they begin to feel like something else entirely. Monuments, maybe. Small ones. Quiet ones. Devastating ones.
Here is something else about morning that takes a while to notice. The world does not pause for it.
At first that can feel almost cruel. The birds outside the window continue singing as if nothing has changed. The neighbor pulls out of the driveway at the same time he always does. The mail still arrives in the afternoon. Someone down the street is mowing the lawn, and for a moment you want to step outside and ask how it is possible that ordinary life is still happening.
Life just keeps moving. The audacity of it can feel almost offensive.
And yet, after standing at enough gravesides and sitting with enough families during the early days of their loss, I have begun to notice something about mornings. Morning is often where the story quietly begins to turn. Not because the grief has disappeared. It has not. Not because the pain suddenly lifts with the rising sun. It does not, at least not for a long time.
But morning carries a kind of stubbornness that night does not have. A quiet persistence that shows up whether you invited it or not.
There is a story in the Gospel of John that has always stayed with me. Mary goes to the tomb at dawn. Not midday when the sun is high, and not later in the afternoon when the world might feel a little less fragile. She goes at dawn, in that earliest and most uncertain light, when it would have been easier and perhaps more sensible to stay home. But she goes anyway, carrying her grief like something she cannot set down.
And it is there, in that dim morning light, that she discovers the story is not finished. That moment did not erase any of it — the tomb was real, the death was real, the grief was real — but morning held something she could not have imagined while the night was still heavy around her.
I am not going to paper over anyone’s grief with a resurrection metaphor. Your loss is real. The empty chair is real. The cold coffee is real. But I do believe that morning carries something within it. It carries a stubbornness and with that, a quiet insistence that the story is still being written.
Maybe that is what grace looks like in the early days of loss. Not comfort exactly and not answers. Certainly not the feeling that everything is suddenly okay, because everything is not okay and pretending otherwise helps no one.
Sometimes grace simply looks like morning. Morning arriving again, uninvited and persistent, refusing to not show up. The coffee pot still working. The birds outside the window completely unaware of your pain. The light coming through the same window it always has, landing on the floor in the same place as yesterday, as if it has not yet heard the news.
At first that can feel like cruelty.
But maybe it is not.
Maybe it is the world quietly insisting that there is still a day here. And that day, however fragile it feels, still belongs to you.
You do not have to be okay in the morning. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. You are allowed to sit with the second mug still resting on the counter. You are allowed to let the coffee grow cold. You are allowed to stay in the chair by the window longer than is practical, watching the neighbor mow his lawn and feeling the strange distance between his world and yours.
You are allowed to let morning be hard.
But here is something I have learned from watching people carry this weight. Morning keeps coming back. Every single day it arrives without asking permission and without checking whether you feel ready for it.
It simply appears again, faithful in a way that almost feels stubborn.
And somewhere inside that stubborn return there is a kind of grace. Not the grace that fixes things, but the grace that stays. The grace that quietly says, I know you did not sleep well. I know you forgot for a moment and then remembered. I know the coffee pot broke your heart again this morning.
Here is a little more light anyway.
The Unlikely Altar this time might simply be the window, the same window the light comes through every morning, landing in the same place on the floor.
It does not know your grief. It cannot fix your grief.
But it shows up anyway.
And maybe, just for today, that small and stubborn light is enough to help you begin again.
Someday after I die, my sons are going to have to go through my stuff, and I have to admit that I find this thought both amusing and a little terrifying. Not because I'm hiding anything particularly scandalous, or at least nothing they'll be able to prove, but because I know how much stuff I've accumulated over the years that makes perfect sense to me and will make absolutely no sense to them. I can already picture it. One of them will open a drawer, pull out some completely inexplicable object and ask the other, “Do you have any idea why Dad kept this?” The answer will almost certainly be no. Eventually somebody will say, “We probably shouldn't throw it away,” and into a box it will go. That box will be labeled DAD'S STUFF and moved from closet to closet for the next twenty years because apparently one of the things we inherit from the people we love is the inability to throw away their weird crap. That's funny when we're talking about old ticket stubs, charging cables, or whatever other treasures my children someday discover. It becomes considerably less funny when the thing they're trying to find is an insurance policy, a bank account, an important password or the answer to a very simple question: What did Dad want us to do? I've spent enough time around death to know that dying leaves behind more than grief. It leaves behind an astonishing amount of administrative work, and unfortunately the electric company, Netflix and the HOA don't receive some cosmic notification that says, “Marty died Tuesday, please stop sending him bills.” The financial machinery of a person's life keeps humming along until somebody who is very much alive starts shutting it down. That's something we don't talk about much when we talk about “final expenses.” We usually mean the funeral, and certainly that's part of it, but the funeral isn't the only bill that survives us. There is a strange stretch of time between someone's death and the moment their financial life finally comes to rest, and somebody has to live through that stretch. Usually, that somebody is a person who loved us, and they're doing all of this while grieving. They may be planning a funeral while trying to figure out whether the mortgage has been paid, which bills are automatically drafted, how long the electricity needs to stay on and what accounts need to be closed. Someone may have to miss work or travel. There may be a car to sell, subscriptions to cancel or a dog that suddenly needs somewhere to live. I've seen enough grief to know what it can do to an otherwise perfectly capable person. People forget things. They read the same piece of paper three times and still aren't sure what it says. They can make a dozen decisions at the funeral home and then become completely overwhelmed deciding what everybody should eat for dinner. Yet right in the middle of all that, we sometimes leave them a scavenger hunt. Where's the will? Did Mom have insurance? Who's the beneficiary? Where does Dad bank? What's the password? And eventually, “ Why in God's name was he still paying $14.99 a month for this?” The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether planning for our death is less about having everything perfectly arranged and more about simply leaving fewer questions. Most of us aren't going to leave behind a beautifully organized binder with labeled tabs containing everything our family could possibly need. If you have one of those, congratulations. I admire you and also find you slightly suspicious. The rest of us can at least tell someone where the important things are, what we've already arranged and what we want done. And if we have life insurance, perhaps we should make sure the person we've named as beneficiary actually knows the policy exists. That's also why I've started thinking differently about final expense insurance. Yes, it can provide money for a funeral or cremation, but it can also provide something less obvious: a little financial breathing room during that strange period when someone is grieving you while simultaneously trying to wind down the life you left behind. It isn't supposed to turn someone's death into a payday, nor does everybody need a huge policy. It’s simply money that’s there when the person you chose as your beneficiary needs it, without you having to predict which expense is going to arrive first. Maybe “final expense” is actually a misleading name because death doesn't come with one final expense neatly printed at the bottom of a receipt. It comes with bills, responsibilities, decisions and questions, and eventually the people who love us have to sort through all of them. Someday my sons really will go through my stuff. They'll throw some of it away, keep some of it and probably find a few things that make them wonder what exactly was wrong with their father. I hope they laugh. I hope they find things that bring back stories and, for a moment, bring me back into the room with them. But here's what I don't want. I don't want what I leave behind to become something they have to carry. I can't spare them the grief of losing their father someday. There isn't an insurance policy in the world that can do that. But I can leave fewer questions, make a few decisions now instead of leaving those decisions to them and provide some financial breathing room for whatever that day brings. Maybe that's what a loving legacy looks like. We can't make death easy for the people we love, but we can try to make what comes after it a little easier. Because death doesn't cancel autopay. But love can plan ahead.
I went to see the new Spider-Man movie, got myself tangled up in thoughts about webs, connection, and our rather inconvenient need for other people, and decided I had found the Unlikely Altar . I even wrote about it in my last blog, Trust the Web . I figured I was done with Spider-Man . But I guess Spider-Man wasn't done with me. One day as I was driving home from a funeral home, I heard something that made me think about the movie all over again. I was listening to a podcast, The Big Picture, and one of the hosts, Amanda , said something almost in passing. She said the real villain of the Spider-Man movie was loneliness . The other hosts didn't really acknowledge it and the conversation moved on. But I couldn't shake it. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if she had seen something hiding in plain sight; something that I might have missed. The trailer tells us that Spider-Man is up against " a powerful villain no one can even see. " Maybe that's not just a clue about the movie's mystery. Maybe it's the movie's deepest truth. Because loneliness was everywhere in the story. It was there every time Peter Parker walked past someone who used to know him and didn't get so much as a second glance. It was there when he sat alone in an apartment that used to be full of people. It was there in the quiet, unglamorous fact that the world had simply moved on without him. Nobody made a big deal about it. Because that's not how loneliness usually works. It doesn't announce itself, instead it just keeps piling on. It is that way in this movie and it is that way in real life. The strange thing about loneliness is that there isn't just one way it finds us. Sometimes it finds us when someone dies. Sometimes a marriage ends, or a friendship that once seemed permanent quietly disappears. And sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all. We're just lonely. I mentioned this idea for the blog to a good friend of mine, and his response stopped me. His mother recently lost her husband and now lives with him and his family. She isn't alone. There are people in the house who love her. There are meals and conversations and all the ordinary movement of family life around her. But her world has been getting smaller. Her husband is gone. She can no longer drive. Friends who once called or texted don't seem to anymore. "Mom is experiencing that now," he told me. "Even with us around." And then he said something I haven't been able to forget. "I see it every day." Maybe that's what we misunderstand about loneliness. We sometimes treat it like a math problem. Put enough people in the room and loneliness should disappear. But it doesn't work that way. Sometimes you can be deeply loved and still deeply lonely. What you miss isn't " people " - - you miss a particular person, a particular life. The one who knew how you took your coffee. The familiar voice from the other room. The freedom to get in the car and go somewhere, the job where people knew your name, the routines you never realized were holding your world together until they were gone. Maybe loneliness isn't always an empty room. Sometimes it's the empty spaces left inside a life that is still very much full of people. I've seen that kind of loneliness in my work. I've seen it at funerals where a widow or widower is surrounded by a room full of people who genuinely love them, while knowing that eventually everyone will go home. And so will they. Except they will go home without the one person they desperately wish were going with them. I know something about that kind of loneliness too. Chances are, you have too. Sometimes it lasts an evening and then there are times when it lasts much longer. Sometimes we know exactly why it's there, and sometimes we couldn't explain it if we tried. We can be lonely in an empty house. We can also be lonely at a crowded table. Maybe that's why loneliness makes such a good villain. It doesn't need a mask . It hides in the quiet apartment, the empty side of the bed, the phone call you don't make anymore. Nobody claps when it's defeated because most of the time nobody else even knew it was there. And I don't think Spider-Man ever really beats it. Not for good. But then I'm not sure any of us do. Maybe that's because loneliness isn't always something to be defeated. Sometimes there is no fixing the empty side of the bed. No replacing the person who knew how you took your coffee. No giving someone back the life they had before the world changed. Maybe, for now, the point is simply to notice. Not because noticing leads somewhere, not because it's the first step toward fixing anything. It doesn't solve the math. Counting heads in a room never made anyone less lonely, and neither will counting the people who noticed. Noticing isn't a means to an end here — it's the whole point. That's the Unlikely Altar this time. Not the web itself, but the moment somebody stops and sees the person standing in it, caught, and says so out loud. Amanda, catching it in a sentence almost nobody else heard. My friend, seeing it in his mother every day, in a house full of people who love her. Somebody, once, seeing it in me. Maybe that's how we keep weaving the web. Not by making loneliness disappear. By making sure the lonely don't disappear with it.
I have reached the age where I watch superhero movies differently than I used to. Don't get me wrong. I still enjoy the explosions, the impossible stunts, and the inevitable scene where New York is somehow once again hanging by a thread. But somewhere along the way I've become the guy who walks out of the theater thinking less about the villain and more about what the story says about being human. That happened again after watching the new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day. As I thought about the movie, I found myself wondering what Spider-Man's greatest invention really is. At first, I thought it was the suit. It is definitely iconic, but I remembered his best suit wasn't even his own invention. That one? It was designed, built and provided by Tony Stark. So maybe it's his strength, except there are plenty of superheroes who are stronger. Or perhaps it's the ability to swing effortlessly between skyscrapers. As amazing as all of that is, I don't think it's his greatest gift. No, for me, the best, greatest, and yes, maybe even the holiest thing Spider-Man does has always been about the web. A single strand of a spider's web is almost nothing. You can brush it away with the back of your hand and never think twice about it. But strand after strand, woven together with patience and intention, becomes something remarkably strong. Maybe the web was never just a clever way for Spider-Man to get around the city. Maybe it was always pointing toward something truer about the way life actually works. Isn't it interesting? Spider-Man doesn't fly. Superman flies. Iron Man flies. Captain Marvel flies. Spider-Man can't. Every single movement forward depends on attaching himself to something outside himself. The more I thought about that, the more I wondered if the web isn't really a superpower at all. Maybe it's simply a picture of what it means to be human. For a long time, Spider-Man tries to carry everything by himself. He keeps people at a distance, convinced that if he just works a little harder, sacrifices a little more, holds on a little tighter, he can protect everyone he loves. It's a noble instinct. It's also an exhausting one. Eventually he learns what most of us spend a lifetime learning. There are some battles you simply cannot fight alone. Most of us have been taught that the strong life is the independent life. We admire the person who never asks for help, never leans on anyone else, never lets the world see them struggle. We confuse self-sufficiency with maturity. But that's not how Spider-Man survives. Even with all his strength, every swing depends on being connected to something beyond himself. Notice what the web is actually for. Yes, it blocks a punch. It disarms a villain. It restrains someone twice his size. But its quietest work is something else entirely. It keeps him connected to something solid when he has nothing else to stand on. And just as often, it's the thing that catches someone else before they hit the ground. Once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it. I've seen the web in hospital waiting rooms. I've seen it around kitchen tables after someone dies. I've seen it in churches, neighborhoods, baseball dugouts, recovery groups, and around backyard grills. And I've certainly seen it in the hundreds of funerals I've had the privilege to lead. I've never watched a family survive the hardest day of their lives because one person was exceptionally strong. They survived because someone brought dinner. Someone answered the phone. Someone took the kids for the afternoon. Someone sat in silence. Someone refused to let them grieve alone. That's what held them. We spend years weaving these webs without thinking very much about them. Then one day life asks them to hold our whole weight. That's when I realized something. Not all altars are made of stone. Some are woven. Maybe that's the Unlikely Altar. It's not the skyscrapers or the mask. It's not even the superhero. The Unlikely Altar is the web — the ordinary, almost invisible network of relationships that catches us when we fall, steadies us when we lose our footing, and quietly reminds us that none of us was ever meant to swing through life alone. Maybe that's the whole sermon, if you can call it that: Trust the web. And whenever you can, become part of someone else's.