Hello, friends. It has been such a long while since I’ve shared anything in this space. It’s good to be writing to you again. As you can imagine, after such a long hiatus, I have all sorts of swirling thoughts in my head. I don’t know which of them will make their way to the page today, but I hope wherever the Spirit leads will be a word that someone today needs to hear. If nothing else, I’m confident it will be something I need to hear.
This past Saturday, my small Nalean side of the family gathered to bury my father. The last time I saw him, I was 12 years old. He died in Hernandez, New Mexico on January 30 of this year, in a vehicle-pedestrian accident. When my brother and I were asked, as next of kin, to sign the papers authorizing the cremation of his body, I found myself wanting to know everything I could about the place of his death. Here’s what I found out, what I wrote about it, and what I shared at the graveside service, deciding as we drove into the cemetery that I actually wanted to stand and speak.
I search online for Hernandez. It’s a tiny, unincorporated speck of paint on this vast world portrait. And in 1941, late in the afternoon of November 1, with the light just right, Ansel Adams stopped on the side of US Highway 84 and took a picture of it. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico became one of his most prized photographs.
The moon appears to be not quite full, just as it would have been the evening of January 30, 2026, when my dad perhaps looked upon the moon for one last time before taking his final breath. The interplay of light and dark in Ansel Adams’ photo is mesmerizing and evocative. I wonder about lives illuminated not just by the sun but also by the moon. I wonder about the church in the photograph and the small cemetery riddled with crosses. I wonder about the mountains in the distance and the light at the bottom of a darkening sky, just behind those mountains, that looks to me now like a portal, a door to another world.
Perhaps what waits on the other side of that door is a release from regret, freedom for one whose suffering needs to come to an end. And maybe there is freedom on this side of the door, too, for authorizing agents who needed to be known and named before their signatures were required to authorize the cremation of their father’s body.
John has walked through that portal of light, so visible against a darkening sky, and I know he is surrounded by the love and grace, forgiveness and freedom that it seems he wasn’t able to experience fully in this life.
This is too tidy an ending. This is how I’m feeling today. I’ll likely be feeling differently tomorrow. It’s not as though all the anger and pain has disappeared. But for today, anyway, there’s nothing but love in this vast world, where the moonrise is just as potent as the sunrise, and there is powerful peace in endings.
My uncle spoke next, my dad’s younger brother. He shared some of the ways in which John was a really great big brother. But he also spoke the truth, making it clear that John also caused a lot of pain for a lot of people, most especially his children. I can’t begin to express how freeing it felt to hear the truth spoken aloud. Steve reflected on our Lutheran heritage–the grace to which we cling–and suggested that John was never able to comprehend that this grace, forgiveness, and unconditional love was for him. How profoundly sad. Later in the day, sitting around his dining room table, Steve said, “You know, I don’t so much mourn John’s death as I mourn his life.” Same.
Why share this with you? We are a family that has rarely, in my experience, spoken the hard things out loud. I’m sure we’re not the only ones. John’s death may have been intentional, maybe not. But either way, I believe it was his shame that ultimately ended his life. Please don’t let shame destroy your life. Please know that there is nothing that can separate you from the depth of God’s love for you. If you’re carrying the unbearable weight of shame for something you’ve done or left undone, hear this: You are human. And you are forgiven. Now take that grace–share that grace–and live.
When the service was over, I asked if it would be possible for my brother and I to lower our dad’s urn into the ground, rather than leaving it for the cemetery sexton to take care of after we left. I was remembering one especially meaningful burial that I was privileged to be part of as a parish pastor in North Dakota. I wanted that same kind of tangible, hands-in-the-dirt, final-act-of-farewell experience.
The sexton came over with a five-gallon bucket filled with dirt. Bobby and I, on our knees, lowered the urn into the grave. I grabbed a handful of black, Iowa dirt and placed it on top of the urn. And again. And again. Bobby joined me. Others did as well. I held that soil in my hands and remembered making mud pies at Grandma and Grandpa Nalean’s house, mixing dirt and water and spreading it in recycled pot pie tins to dry in the sun, decorating our pies with evergreen sprigs. I spoke these memories aloud at the edge of my dad’s resting place, as I returned him to the earth from which he was made. I recalled Grandma’s garden and the endless adventure of finding and picking ripe strawberries. I thought about the land that my dad farmed with his father, the land that John loved and stewarded.
It didn’t feel like a burial to me at that point. It felt like a birth. A laboring to bring new life into the world–new life unshackled from the burden of the past but also full of gratitude for the beauty of the past; new life without the constant background hum of wondering about my dad and never knowing if I might hear from him, or run into him randomly, or be faced with the honestly terrifying prospect of seeing him face-to-face and needing to somehow say something to him after 38 years of terrible absence.
Are there things I wish I had been able to say to him in this life? Not so much as a daughter, no. But as a human being speaking to another human being–as a beloved child of God speaking to another beloved child of God–I wish I could have said to him what I said to you above: You are human. And you are forgiven. Now take that grace–share that grace–and live.
Love,
Stacey
A little bit about Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonrise,_Hernandez,_New_Mexico
And my dad’s obituary, written by his siblings. I’m grateful they had a fairly recent picture to share, as we weren’t able to view the body and I hadn’t seen my dad, even in a picture, for so long.
https://www.ogdenreporter.com/content/john-nalean