His Clothes Are Still In The Closet

You opened it for something of your own and looked at the other side of the rail.

That is what happens. You go in for a coat, and your hand is on your own things, and your eye goes across, and there they are, in the order he left them, with the one at the end that he wore more than the others.

And you stand there for a moment, and then you take your coat and close the door.

That has happened a few hundred times now.

And somebody has started to mention it. Kindly. Somebody who loves you, in a soft voice, at the end of a visit, in the phrasing people use when they have decided a thing is for your own good: have you thought about maybe, when you feel ready, doing something with his things.

And you said something noncommittal, and they let it go, and it will come back in about six weeks.

So let me be completely plain about what this article does.

Nothing gets moved.

Nothing is sorted, nothing is bagged, nothing is given to anybody, and nothing is set aside to keep. There is no first step in here and no gentle beginning of a process. This article does not want anything out of that closet.

And there is no timeline in it. Not a suggestion about a year, not a mention of what most people find, not one sentence about what usually happens by such and such a point. Nobody who has ever written a sentence like that knew your marriage.

I am not going to hurry you, and I am going to say why, because there is a reason underneath it and it is not sentimentality.

Jesus wept

There are two words in John that settle this, and their position in the story is what makes them enormous.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35, King James Version)

Jesus wept.

Look at where that sits.

He is standing outside a tomb, with a family in front of him who have been asking for four days where he was. He knows exactly what he is about to do. There is nothing uncertain to him about how this afternoon ends.

And he weeps.

Not briefly, and not as a formality. The verse before says he groaned in the spirit and was troubled, and the people watching remarked on how much he loved him.

Now sit with the strangeness of that. If the ending is known, the grief is technically unnecessary. Somebody standing there with full knowledge of the next ten minutes has, on paper, no reason to be undone by this.

And he is undone by it anyway, and scripture records it in two words and does not explain it or apologize for it.

That tells you what God actually thinks about grieving in the presence of a good outcome. It is not a failure of faith. It is not something to be got through efficiently by a person with the right perspective. The Lord of life stood in front of a grave he was about to open and wept, and nobody in that account tells him it is time to move on.

And notice the other thing he does not do. He does not tell Mary how long it is reasonable to be like this. He does not manage her. She comes and falls at his feet and says the same thing her sister said, and he does not correct her or reframe it. He asks where they have laid him, and then he weeps with her.

Grief in the presence of a known good outcome is never once corrected in that account, and weeping has never once been a failure of faith. John 11:35 sets two words outside a tomb and explains nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing at an open closet door.

Nearness is not avoidance

Here is the practical half, and it is about what the closet is actually doing.

Those clothes are not stopping you.

That is what the gentle suggestion assumes. Behind it there is a model in which the belongings are an obstacle, and grief is a corridor, and the objects hold you at a particular point in it, and moving them moves you along.

That model is wrong, and it has been applied to bereaved people for about a century with a great deal of confidence and very little evidence.

What is actually happening when you open that door is that you are near him. His shape is in those shoulders. The smell is his. That is not a delusion and it is not you refusing something. It is the last physical location of a person in a world where he does not have one any more, and standing in front of it for a few seconds is a way of being with him.

Nobody is harmed by that. Not you, and not the person who has started mentioning it, who is uncomfortable rather than harmed, which is a different matter entirely and is theirs to carry.

And here is what I want to name about their asking, because you have been feeling something about it that you have not put into words.

They are not wrong to love you. They are wrong about what the closet is. To them it looks like a room where something has not been dealt with. To you it is where he is, and those are so far apart that no conversation between the two of you is going to close the gap in one evening.

So you are allowed to keep saying something noncommittal. You do not owe anybody a plan for that closet, and a plan is what they are asking for, and it is not theirs to have.

The closet is where he is and not a corridor you are stuck in, and standing near his things has never once been avoidance. The written word records the weeping outside a tomb without one word about how long is reasonable, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who owes nobody a plan.

Open it, look, and close it

So here is the assignment, and it is the whole of it, and it does not go anywhere.

Open the door, look, and close it again.

Deliberately, once, not while reaching for a coat. Go and stand in front of it, open it, and look at his things on purpose.

Stay as long as you like. Four seconds or twenty minutes. Touch something or do not.

Then close it, and go and do something else.

And that is all. There is no next part. Nothing has begun and nothing is expected of you tomorrow, and if somebody asks what you have been doing about the closet, the honest answer is nothing, because that is what this is.

Here is why it is worth doing at all, since nothing changes.

At the moment every time you see those clothes it is by accident, in the middle of something else, and you are caught. You did not choose to be looking at them, and each time you have to recover in about two seconds and get on with your day.

Doing it on purpose changes who is in charge of the moment. You decided to open it. You are not being ambushed by your own closet, and the difference between being caught and choosing is the difference between a thing that happens to you and a thing you do.

And doing it deliberately is also, quietly, a refusal. Everybody around you has begun to treat that closet as a problem awaiting a decision. Going and standing in front of it and then leaving it exactly as it was is a way of saying, to yourself and to nobody else, that it is not a problem and there is no decision pending.

You are able to choose the moment rather than be caught by it, and opening it on purpose has never once been the start of anything. John 11:35 weeps outside the tomb and is not hurried by anybody there, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in front of an open closet on purpose.