A Cold November Morning

I t was a cold November morning with a chill in the air that made its way into my lungs with each short breath. And it was dark. A still, calm dark. It was the middle of the night—the early hours of the next day. About 1:30 in the morning.

I was making the trek between two houses. Maybe thirty yards, door to door. And at the end of that short path, we would, for the final time, say goodbye to Mom. She was already gone. She just stopped breathing. Died in her sleep. Now she was with Jesus and no longer with us.

In those early morning hours of November 18, we sat around the dining room table.¹ Family together. Sharing our loss by just being with each other. It was the same table that had hosted so many Thanksgiving get-togethers over all those years. And even in that darkness, it was still a table of thanksgiving.

So many thoughts and emotions. Profound memories and deep musings on life’s mysteries. Now all fresh and floating on the surface of the present. It’s a sacred space when time touches eternity. When the broken meets the whole. When unmet longings envision future reality. It’s a dance of the surreal and the sincere. It’s the mingling of grief and glory. When pathos finds kairos.

Months later, while still living that experience of loss and change, Annie Dillard’s words leapt off the page into my soul. She mentioned November 18, and I felt seen and comforted. I felt part of the story. Maybe it was a strange coincidence or just another nudge to trust and live. In Holy the Firm, she writes, “Today, November 18 and no wind, today a veil of air has lifted that I didn’t know was there.”²

Sometimes we’re just unaware until a veil is removed. We don’t see what we can’t see. But lift the veil and we see life from a new perspective—a new vantage point. We’re all born with a veil that prevents us from seeing clearly. That veil is taken away when we turn to Jesus.³ He helps us see. But I wonder if life can be filled with perpetual experiences of seeing things differently—seeing new things. New views unencumbered by a veil.

I saw differently that November day. Life is precious and brief. It’s like a mist.⁴ Or a wisp of fog.⁵ Or a puff of smoke.⁶ Life is like “a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”⁷

This life is temporary. Maybe we don’t really know what we have until we no longer have it. Sometimes experiences remind me that “…a veil of air has lifted that I didn’t know was there.”

Mom is gone but her legacy is alive. “I’m so proud of our family,” she would often say. Like Mom, as the years go on, others of us will step into eternity to experience life as it was always meant to be. Until then, new lives enter the world; we welcome babies into our family. And we marvel at the miracle of life. When the veil is lifted, life seems clear.

Annie Dillard unravels more of her own November 18 experience and speaks into mine once more when she says,

NOTES

1. Mom died on November 18, 2022.
2. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1977, 2003), pp. 25-26.
3. 2 Corinthians 3:16.
4. James 4:14 NIV.
5. James 4:14 The Message.
6. James 4:14 NET.
7. James 4:14 NKJV.
8. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, pp. 29-30. (Emphasis mine).