A long time ago, when I was a five-year-old boy, my father died. He was thirty years old. My mother, the young widow, found herself alone with her two sons: me and my younger brother.

Much of that time is lost to memory now, but I vaguely recall that, at one point, my brother and I were taken away for a few days. I believe my mother needed to be medicated for the shock. A more vivid memory is of our being returned home. The news of my father’s death had not yet been broken to us at that point. As we were led back down our driveway, I was struck by how many people were in our house. I remember my mother, glassy-eyed, coming hurriedly out of the house to greet us with her arms extended, fully intending to gather us into her embrace, gripping us as though she’d never let us go again. Somebody quietly told me and my brother to come and see my father’s new bed. As we were led into the living room, I said to myself, “That’s not a bed. It’s a coffin. Daddy’s dead.” Such insight for a five-year-old!

We were told to give him a kiss goodbye because, very soon, angels would come for him. Then occurred the first regret of my life. While I kissed him on his right cheek, it was merely the lightest of kisses because, truthfully, I really did not want to kiss him at all. He lay there, strangely, in the living-room, dead in a coffin. He was changed. Death had stilled his vibrancy, and dead men—unlike my vivacious dad—do not smile. So it was that I gave him a kiss that did not measure up to the kiss that later I wish, with all my heart, that I had given him.

A moment arrived when my brother and I were taken away on a walk. Our Aunt Nell brought us down the street and we ended up in the nearby school playground. I recall my eagerness to get back to the house. I did not want to miss the arrival of angels who would take my father. Imagine the disappointment in my young soul when we returned, only to find that he and his coffin were gone, and the house was empty of visitors.

That night, I made a decision that I would try to remember everything about him so that I would never forget him. Again, such precocious wisdom! And what of my grief? I don’t think that I wept much, but I can’t be sure. The grief of young children takes a different course to the sudden, eruptive outpouring in adults. It tends to play itself out over the longer term. It is a kinder, gentler grief, but no less real for that.

Years later, I would dream of him. One dream in particular would recur. Out of the blue, he would come to the front door of our new house and ring the doorbell. I would open the door and be both delighted and stunned beyond comprehension to see him there. He would smile but never would speak. He would come in, sit, and be among us, but all too soon he would rise to leave. I would try to cling to him, frantic, but there was nothing I could do to make him stay. His leaving again seemed to belong to the right order of things, and his calm smile never ceased. Inexorably, he would disappear somewhere beyond the driveway, leaving only the trace of his presence in his wake.

As I think over those desperate times, I find myself immensely grateful to my childhood self who prudently sought to remember all that he could. Consequently, my father, dead and gone, remained meaningfully present to me through his absence, an absence that was no fault of his own.

If absence invites us to remember, then it also becomes the occasion for renewing the reality of the person: he was real, he was here, he was with me. In an enduring sense, he is always here, not physically, but in memory, paradoxically present in the mode of absence. The mold of the man remained; and that was not nothing for a young boy.

One example: I remember a morning when I watched my dad wash his hands. After lathering his hands with a bar of soap, he would quickly rinse and squeeze his palms together, making a funny flatulent sound, and then proceed to repeat the process two more times. In my childish mind, I formed the impression that that was precisely how real men wash their hands, and that impression has endured to this day.

As the years go by, all of us inevitably must say goodbye to those we love, to those who have loved us. In the normal course of things, we expect that grandparents would succumb to their old age. So too, we witness the passing of neighbors and colleagues, as we do the passing of friends. As children, many of us first encounter death through the loss of a beloved pet.

In differing degrees, grief wells up in us, and finds its channel. As it must. To grieve is to love and to remember, and to feel the meaningful absence that loss has brought. Grief confronts emptiness honestly and fills it with the genuineness of tears and longing. In the end, hopefully, we come to understand that absence is not the same as emptiness. Grieving our way beyond the agony of loss gradually amounts to reconciliation with absence and memory.

Sometimes, a death occurs outside the bounds of the normal and seems to bring a further dimension of suffering to grief.

One of my close friends took his own life. Let’s call him Dave. His was a struggle with mental illness that had set in over the previous ten years, soon after the deaths of both of his parents in quick succession. We knew that he struggled, but when he walked into a river in the early afternoon of a cold October’s afternoon, nobody could have expected it.

Dave, with whom I had shared my late teens and much of my adulthood, was now no more; ripped from us all. So suddenly, fearfully. When I got the news, it took me about thirty minutes to move from stultified shock to grief, but when grief came, it gushed forth in spasms. So it continued for me for some days, but eventually the beginnings of reconciliation with the fact of his death occurred. Funerals serve various purposes, but one of them is offering an opportunity to those present to reconcile with the fact of mortal loss.

What opened up to me at Dave’s funeral, in the company of those who loved him and grieved him, was a horizon of meaning that, in the tide of feelings, I had been unable to catch sight of. His life was no random occurrence—as though he were a chance spark of light out of the darkness of oblivion, now extinguished and returned to the oblivion—but a unique event. I grasped that he was an event within a larger cosmos that holds us all in life and death. His very existence was something, someone, given. His life, his sufferings, his talents and wit, his loves and longings were somehow, from the start, all given to him. In the fullness of the encompassing cosmos, I grieved him as though he was the one who was always needed, always wanted. Thus was his friendship also given. It was a givenness, a gift, to me, to all of us who could be present at the funeral, and to anyone who knew him. With givenness comes gratitude. In my grief, Dave’s funeral provided for an emergent sense of gratitude, rising from the midst of grief. I found that I really could be consoled by gratitude for having known and loved him.

There is a mystery that surrounds us. It is the mystery of existence as given. The mysterious giving of life is not undone in the taking of death. Like the dream of my father who could not stay among us, the trace of any loved one who has died lingers on.

We remember. Our grief is real. But we are grateful for their life and love.

Moreover, it is true that in life the person who is loved and stands in our presence is both entirely here and not entirely here. That is, not all that you are could be present in any moment. Even if you were to stand before me and speak to me about your life, I would hear your words, I would look upon your face and read your body language, but there would still remain so much left unspoken. Beyond your words, there would remain the ocean of your memories and insights, your joys and anticipations, the images that scare you and the possibilities that motivate you; there are also the hidden neuroses, blindspots, associations, and preferences that you yourself are barely aware of. Each of us brings such an ocean with us that provides the depth beneath the surface in every moment. There is more to anyone than we can see or they themselves can account for.

In death too, the person who is loved is neither entirely here nor entirely not here, but somehow in between.

Each of us already lives in between what is present and what is absent, between the fact of givenness and the mystery of givenness.

The truth of this insight pressed itself upon me in the days after Dave’s death. I became acutely aware of how even some phrases I use were first borrowed from him so many years ago. I recalled how even the way he walked or got agitated when annoyed or how he supported a football team that I dislike nevertheless brought me consolation, because these were aspects of him in his pricelessness and irreplaceability—in the abiding givenness of his uniqueness—that remained. Dave is gone now, but these are the memories of him that, alive or dead, he has enriched my life with.

In remembering our beloved dead, we render them present through their absence. We’re just walking down the road with them, all over again, but differently now. They have passed into the ages.

Their presence endures within us, becomes part of us, and it is in memory and love that we keep on walking with them, and they with us, in each of these moments that remain.