Decide to make a cemetery stop. Check on the daffodils I planted around his (our) stone. Have a quiet moment of my own. Once off the interstate, I turn left down a brick, narrow street. Enter the cemetery’s single lane road. Wind past stones I’ve grown to accept and even find solace in including the memorial to those humans brave enough to donate their bodies to the advancement of science and medicine for all people, known and unknown.

It’s Holy Week or close to it. Close enough for me to feel its intensity in my body. Enough to wonder why a pastor of fifty plus years decided right now to transition from this life into the next one (Shouldn’t he know better? As in every pastor is nearing exhaustion including me?). I approach the right turn into our section. An area I am proud to say boasts a restored prairie, woods with hiking trails, and a columbarium. But today instead of the usual hikers, and dog walkers, I find a line of cars park in the middle of the narrow road. Empty cars with no burial tent in sight. And there are people everywhere riding bicycles grinning like their ten-year-old selves.

I suspect I witness a celebration of a recently deceased cyclist. Yet to my seasoned pastoral eye, this seems to be an event organized by friends and family. People not in the business of death. Nothing wrong per se with those who do not include the dying and dead in their profession. Yet, I’ve already learned in three short years of ministry that people can be, well to be frank, clueless as to the nuances of impending death, death itself, and post death realities and its rituals. The last in my list is where a good funeral director is more than helpful. Even if there is no ceremony, worship service, memorial service, celebration of life, or funeral. These people know the landscape and language of this time. Because a good funeral director would have had those cars parked along the sides of the road making way for other people visiting their loved ones’ graves. A good funeral director would know what else was happening in the cemetery that day such as burials or mowing or road maintenance. A good funeral director would direct the cycle traffic reminding everyone that there will be walkers and cars in the cemetery and everyone must share the road. A good funeral director would have thought of me and people like me who come to the cemetery to feel what the living of life often masks--our sadness. But instead, I encounter a gleeful, happy crowd of cyclists who are fully absorbed in their mourning ritual taking over a place of which I now have partial ownership of.

When I finally figure out how to park, I become a point of curiosity. For one thing I am not one of them. I have not been invited to this party. Also having emerged from my car, my clerical collar proceeds me. My collar, an outward sign to some of their childhoods, church hurts, and feelings about gods and God. To others a symbol of what I will do in an hour or so. Commend a dying one to God. Yet what I am not here to do right now is to remind this group of anything, life or death or even their spiritual selves. In this moment I am here only as a widow.

During another visit here I was walking along the road, lost in solemn, sad, and introspective thoughts. As I rounded the road’s curve toward the trailhead two couples a generation older than myself were laughing and parading around a newly installed gravestone. I looked up because people are not typically joyful in the cemetery. That’s what I’m thinking and in truth in a judgmental way when one of the women looks at me and says, “Oh! Do you have your grave here too?”

How am I to reply? I want to scream, “I SHOULD NOT BE HERE YET!” Instead, I say and I admit in clipped tones, “My husband is buried here.” Then I walk on not waiting for a response.

I am around death a lot. It’s not gleeful. Peaceful, it can be. Yet peace and joy are gifts at death. Not all of us receive them when a loved one dies. When death is not peaceful, like Tony’s death day, those remaining spend a lifetime gathering particles of peace, enough to keep living.

The cycles everyone is riding today are expensive. I recognize the brand names now married to an avid cyclist. Our garage and basement filled with cycles, tools, and parts. I think, “If you can afford these cycles, you can afford a F***’in funeral director! Those are my thoughts, not empathetic. Certainly not compassionate. But in grief, others’ experiences and needs are not primary. Not even close.

Daffodils poke out of spring’s ground around Tony’s grave. I clean up dead leaves, count the rocks on the top of the stone, take a deep breath acknowledging the truth of this place in my sons’ and my continued life. Then it’s time for me to go from death’s markers to the hospital room of a dying one.

I spend ten minutes maneuvering my car out of its parking place with the help of one very happy cyclist.

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WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

So, if you read the above essay you have a sense of me. I’m intense, fierce, prophetic, and at times humorous (or so I’m told). I don’t know how often I’ll post. Pastoring a congregation asks of me ever changing amounts of time strewn over many hours of any given day. Like last evening at 9:30 PM when I was tucked into bed reading a book about vocation. Having begun my pastoring day around 6:00 AM praying for the world and all those in need. Now comfy in my worn, old-lady pajamas from Costco. Thinking it was time to curl up and go to sleep when the doorbell rang. My husband, plugged into his earbuds in another room (fully dressed), didn’t hear my high pitched, frantic call for help. As in “OPEN THE DOOR!”

So I threw on a ratty sweatshirt (even though it was 80 degrees or so in the house) and opened the door. A soon-to-turn eighteen-year-old congregant stood on our stoop covered in grease from his summer job as a car mechanic apprentice. He needed a Menard’s receipt so he could exchange the wood he’s using to build raised vegetable beds in our congregation’s (St. John’s ELCA Lutheran Church in Rock Island, Illinois) soil restoration garden. He also needed the bathroom and to share some of his frustrating work day with my husband (now fully aware of our visitor) and me, his pastor.

So, Substack time or any social media time, ends up being secondary to this wild and wonderful work I am called to do as a pastor. However, I do have a new book being released this fall (more on that in subsequent posts). So you may hear from me more often. I’ve been told the third book is the charm but this is my second. And I’m still thrilled to have had a first book. Check out my bio for more information on my vocational work as a writer and author if you are curious.

Until next time, may you sit with your breath, befriend your deepest self, and know that you have the courage to heal.

~Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Me, kneeling in St. John’s soil restoration garden hoping I don’t get bit up by the bugs crawling up my ankles. Photo credit goes to my husband, Forrest T. Meyer.