I have been talking a lot about death this week.

And to me, that is natural now. I do not talk about death in a morbid and obsessive way, as some might think.

Death pops up in my conversations. In my blog posts. On my Facebook.

And since my son is dead, I do not mind talking about the subject.

It is my way of keeping my son alive, paradoxical as it may sound.

This week, Lexi, another beautiful bereaved mummy, agreed to publish Georgie’s story on her baby loss blog. Of course, death was part of the story, as it is part of every baby loss story on her website.

This week, I had lunch with an amazing woman who had spent some of her youth nursing abandoned Romanian AIDS babies not back to health, as she would have wished but onto death. And of course, we talked about pain and death and the great privilege of looking after precious souls so close to their passing into eternity hour and the love we feel for them.

Yesterday, I exchanged emails with another recently bereaved mummy. And of course, we talked about our sons and their final days and their death and about the immense hole they left in our souls.

This week, I wrote about Heaven. And of course, the only way to get there is through death so my post was not very popular despite the fact that death was not mentioned as such.

I had one message though, that struck a cord with me following my blog post. It was about the need to talk about death more as a society. About how death news is received with blank stares and even blanker responses in church and how the bereaved are pushed in a corner instead of being allowed to express their grief and sorrow.

And then, this week, I was asked to teach for a few hours and one of the things we talked about was Easter week. And guess what? Death was in that story too, even in the Lego version we watched, so it can be age appropriate for the children:

I have not been able to listen to worship or hear sermons since before Christmas. They just do not align with what we saw and felt, our experience and our loss and it would feel extremely phony to stand there “worshiping” while my heart is drowning in questions.

But you know what I was able to do? I was able to watch the Easter story. And I did feel God whisper, ever so gently to my heart:

“Now you understand. Now you know how it felt, losing a Son. Now we share the reality of loss, you and I.”

So maybe I won’t be able to worship Him. And maybe He does not even expect me to.

Because now, I worship Him in “spirit and in truth.” Now I really know how He must have felt in His spirit when Jesus died and I know the truth of death.

Thank you to each and every one of you who opened up to me this week and shared about your painful experiences and about the death of your loved ones.

I have felt as if we were worshiping God together in our sharing, in our rawness, in our pain.

True worship.

Because death was never meant to be and will never be the end of the story. It is just a part, an essential part of it but not the end.

Feel free to talk to me about your departed loved ones. Their stories need shared and heard and are to God as good an worship act as any.

Our loved ones were created by Him and are still very much in His heart, as they are in ours. Keeping them alive through reminiscing honours Him for the beautiful Creator that He is.