In the course of my work as a church organist, one of the most sensitive situations I've been called upon to serve was the memorial service for an infant who survived only part of one day. The gathering was small – close family only.
Before the service, I stopped to offer at least the formality of condolence for a situation nobody but those people could fully imagine. I found myself alone with the pastor and the father of the little infant who had passed. I did not ask him for details. However, perhaps to offer polite conversation, perhaps to give an account of his daughter's life and make it worth something, perhaps just out of the exhausted energy of the bereaved, the young father carefully narrated for me the series of events around his daughter's birth and her brief day of life.
After the chronology – those events that took their factual, indelible place in time – he continued into a second phase. He went on to say that, as an engineer, he had trouble making peace with the failure of systems that seemed to be in working order. Whereas the factual section could not be denied, I perceived that this pondering section was no less a part of the retelling that was now habitual, but it was the part that kept bouncing off an impenetrable wall of painful confusion.
For some reason, I opened my mouth and said this: for as much as human beings are essentially organisms of soft tissue and water, shocked into life, raised often in adversity and risk, stumbling forward through life for years and years on end, the big surprise isn't that we sometimes succumb to inherent human weakness and die. The miracle is that we survive at all.
At the seams of life and death, we stand less on mechanics and yield more to mystery.
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