Flag at half staff, but still flying

Dear Friends in Christ -

Even as I type this, my childhood friend Barbie is following her husband's flag-draped coffin from the funeral home to the church of our childhood. With her aging mother and her teen-age children, Barbie will sit on the same mottled-orange pews on which we wriggled through Sunday services two and a half decades ago.

Though the sun is shining in Goldendale as it is here today, the mood is somber in this one-horse town. All the shops will close at one o'clock so everyone can be at the memorial service at two.

And even in the midst of it all, people will look up. They'll talk not only about how sad it is to lose Mark, but also about his full-on commitment to freedom for his country and to love of his family. The flag will fly at half-staff, but it will still fly. And that, people will say, is how it should be.

"Life is changed, not ended" we say in our Episcopal burial liturgy. The loss of a loved one, especially someone dying so young, is the test of whether not we really believe what we pray.

I wish I could be there with my parents and brother and all of the others who will gather today. The day will be marked by tales of heroism and by the sound of taps, by the prairie winds whispering their own prayers during the pauses between words as people say their last good-byes and the coffin is lowered into the earth.

I've stood at so many gravesites on so many occasions, I can imagine it perfectly. The moment after I lay a flower, bend to touch the coffin one last time, I have a choice. What will I do next? Can I, will I, put one foot in front of the other? Do I have the faith to choose to move?

God in heaven, have mercy this day. Receive into your loving arms your faithful servant Mark; we entrust him to your care. And have mercy on us, too. Give us strength not just to survive, but also to really live. Give us courage to look up once again. Amen.

Janet+

Mark W. Coleman

Dear Friends in Christ -

Yesterday (Sunday) morning, one of my childhood friends received a knock on her door. When she opened it, three uniformed army officers were on her doorstep. "Ma'am, we regret to inform you . . ." Barbie says she can't remember anything after that except that they told her that her husband Mark had been blown up in Afghanistan.

I think it likely that the "regret to inform you" guys didn't actually say, at least as their opening line, that Mark was "blown up." But certainly "blown up" is how everything feels to Barbie and her two kids (one's college-age and one's graduating from high school in June).

Mark was an Army Ranger. He was proud of his work, of the string of grace and good luck and good teamwork that had kept him safe from harm in the midst of dangerous ops for roughly 20 years.

As if to soften the blow, everyone says that we knew that "this" could happen some day. But something inside me screams that surely we must not have really, really KNOWN, or we would have done something more to stop this war . . . and the others. For even this one life is too high a price to pay. One life so strong yet so fragile. Irreplaceable.

Sorrowing,
Janet+