By Mark & Sherry Jordan
As you can tell from the puzzle’s title, this week’s puzzle commemorates some who of those who left us in 2011. The New Year is like stepping into a new room full of possibilities. But it also marks the stepping out of another room, one full of realities, many of them sad.
Grief is a uniquely human experience. A mother cat will spend a day or two in a state of anxiety if the kittens are suddenly gone, but shortly thereafter she will be purring as she lay in the afternoon sun, her lost offspring utterly forgotten.
Not so with our favorite species, humanity. The loss of a friend or family member is felt for the rest of our lives – an empty chair, a photograph, a set of keys triggering new waves of sadness and remembrance.
As we watched video of North Koreans attempting to display coerced grief, we couldn’t help but feel the tears they attempted to muster should be shed for what their dictatorial leader stole from them: a portion of their very souls. This is the greatest tragedy of totalitarianism.
Personally, this year Sherry and I suffered the loss of my father, Harry Jordan. He lived a long, fruitful life, dying on the same day Steve Jobs did, October 5. While the world discussed the loss of this American icon, my family and I gathered at a small Baptist church in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, the same one my father pastored for over twenty years, to begin our process of grieving.
Three years ago Sherry’s father passed away in our home. Two years before that we sat with her mother as she let go of our hands and grasped the hands of the angels who were coming to take her to “Abraham’s bosom,” as the book of Luke describes it. There is not a day goes by that we don’t think of them.
The Goshen community suffered several terrible deaths this year. After the initial reaction of shock, most of us move on with our busy lives. But the families, those who for whom the empty chair still sits, are just beginning a long process of dealing with the loss, of grief.
Of course, there were many other passings in the Goshen community this year which did not make the headlines but their deaths are no less significant in touching the lives of those around them.
A song by Mark Knopfler called “Remembrance Day” captures one way we humans can give something to our departed: remembering. The song commemorates those who died in WWI. A list of very British male names “Sam and Andy, Jack and John, Charlie, Martin, Jamie, Ron, Harry, Stephen, Will and Don, Matthew, Michael” yields into the doleful chorus which repeats over and over, “We will remember them.”
The quote of this week’s puzzle is not about death but about the death of a relationship, something almost as sad as physical death itself. We won’t tell you here who wrote it (that’s for you to solve) but here’s a hint: in 2005 it was voted the number one Canadian song of all time by CBC listeners.
A New Year has arrived. Let us not forget the one that just left us.
