He Was The One Who Read

Your father read every night of his life and you have not finished a book since the funeral.

Nobody has connected those two things out loud, including you, and that is partly because the connection sounds too neat when you say it. Grief does not usually work that tidily. And yet there it is: he died in the spring, and the reading stopped in the spring, and it has been three years.

Here is what makes it hard to talk about. You are not sad when you think about the books. You are sad about a hundred other things, and the books are not on the list. There is no ache there. There is just an absence where an activity used to be, and it does not feel like mourning. It feels like a habit that lapsed.

Which is exactly why it has not been dealt with. Grief you can take somewhere. A lapsed habit you can only feel vaguely guilty about.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, not the books he would have wanted you to read, which is a particular cruelty that gets handed to people in your position. There is no recommendation on this site at all.

And nobody is saying anything about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows about the phone, and being told again returns nothing to you.

What I want to look at is much smaller and I believe it is the actual mechanism.

Reading was not your habit. It was his, and you were inside it.

Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois

There is a sentence at the start of Second Timothy where Paul does something people rarely notice. He traces a faith backward through a family and names the women it came through.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Sit with the words which dwelt first.

Paul is not saying Timothy inherited a copy. He is saying the same faith lived in Lois, then lived in Eunice, and now lives in Timothy, and it is not three faiths that resemble each other. It is one thing that has moved house twice.

And notice that Lois and Eunice are both named. They are not background. The letter puts them in the sentence, on purpose, in a document that was going to outlast everybody in it.

Here is what that gives a man three years past a funeral.

A thing that dwelt first in somebody else is not borrowed. It is not on loan and it does not go back when they go. Paul's whole point is that it dwells in Timothy now, and the fact that it started somewhere else is the reason he can be confident about it rather than an asterisk on it.

You are the second address of something that dwelt in him first, and his dying has never once made your reading his property. 2 Timothy 1:5 traces one faith through three people and says it dwells in the last of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a thing from one generation into the next.

There is more, and it is in a single word: unfeigned.

Not performed. Not a family manner or a household style that everybody kept up. The word insists that what moved from Lois to Eunice to Timothy was the real thing in each of them, not an imitation of the one before.

You have the real thing and not an imitation of his, and thirty years of reading beside him has never once made yours a copy. It is written that the faith was unfeigned in every one of the three, the letter names the women it dwelt in before him, and the Spirit of God is saying that over a man in his father's chair.

It was his habit and you were inside it

Here is the mechanism, and it explains why this does not feel like grief.

For thirty years reading had a context. He read in the evening, and you knew he was reading, and when you read there was a person in the world who would ask what you thought. Not often. Maybe twice a year. But the possibility was permanent, and it was structural.

You never once read for that. That is the point. It was not the motive, it was the room the motive stood in, and you cannot notice a room until it goes.

So when he died, the reading did not lose its reason. It lost its context, and a thing without a context does not feel painful. It feels pointless, which is much harder to identify.

That is why there is no ache in this. An ache tells you what is missing. This just quietly stopped mattering, and nothing in you flagged it, because nothing in you had ever noticed the room was there.

You are missing a room and not a reason, and three years of nothing has never once meant the reading stopped mattering. 2 Timothy 1:5 puts a living faith into a third person and never once needs the first two present for it, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man who lost the person who would have asked.

And there is a second layer, and it is tender.

Some part of you understood that reading again means reading without him asking, and that reading without him asking would make the absence real in a new way. So it was easier to not. Not a decision. A drift, protected by the fact that nobody would ever question it.

You have permission to read in a house where nobody will ask about it, and reading has never once required somebody on the other side of it. The written word traces one thing through Lois and Eunice and lands it in Timothy alone in a prison letter, and His Spirit is the one who guards a man doing a familiar thing for the first time by himself.

One page in your own chair

So here is the assignment, and where you sit is part of it.

Read one page tonight of anything at all, in the chair you usually sit in, and then close it.

Not his chair. Not his book. Not the one he was in the middle of, which is somewhere in the house and which you know exactly the position of, and which is not tonight's assignment and may not be this year's.

Your chair. Any book. One page.

Here is why this shape and not a bigger one.

You are the second address of a living thing, and a funeral in the spring has never once repossessed what moved into a son. The Holy Spirit is the one in that front room with you, and 2 Timothy 1:5 traces one unfeigned faith through three people and lands it in the last of them.

The room is gone and it is not coming back, so the reading has to be able to stand up without it. One page is the smallest possible version of that test, and it is small enough that it does not become an event, and events in a grieving house get postponed indefinitely.

And your own chair, because sitting in his to read would make tonight about him, and tonight is about a thing that dwells in you now.

You are able to read one page in your own chair, and the absence of the man who would have asked has never once disqualified the page. 2 Timothy 1:5 says the faith dwelt first in Lois and now dwells in Timothy, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man reading in his own chair for the first time in three years.

You may find that one page is heavier than you expected, and if it is, close the book and let it be heavy. Heavy is not failure. Heavy is a thing arriving, and the instruction was one page and you will have done it.

You have something living in you that started in him, and a funeral has never once had the authority to take back what already dwells in a son. It is written that the unfeigned faith dwelt first in the grandmother and the mother and now in him also, Paul is certain of the third one, and the Spirit of God is certain here.