Coming home...

My brother Paul is coming home today.

In the next few hours a plane will land and the trip that started out so routinely and ended so unexpectedly will be complete. The usual hugs and unpacking and catching up that mark the end of a business trip have been replaced by baggage handlers taking his body to a quiet hearse, but more than ever we are glad, in our tears, that our Paul is home.

Some decades ago our parents took a leap of faith and moved the family to Minnesota in pursuit of a better job and a better life. And over the years it has become home, first because our parents were there, and now because it is where we bury our dead. We are fixed to this place by life and death and Wisconsin seems so very distant although the border is an easy day's walk away.

Paul will be buried in the same cemetery as my father on the edge of Mahtomedi. It is a remarkably quiet place that had once been the country cemetery for the city of North St. Paul. Now its a remnant of an earlier time, a place surrounded right to the edges by suburbia yet remarkably calling to mind how this area was once a deep woods and a resort town on the edge of the Twin Cities. The old country road is now a busy four laner but there is still a peace there and a sense of the sacred in the middle of cookie cutter townhomes and conformity.

Our name now joins the list of the familiar Mahtomedi family names who have been gathered in this place. If we were not part of this town in life we are, now, in death part and parcel of its life. Whatever the years bring this small piece of land, more than any houses we buy, will mark us as belonging here.

In my mind as I write this I envision the passage of the years to come, the gentle movement of seasons over the resting places of those we love. I imagine standing by the graves of my father and brother in my old age if God so allows thinking of all that has gone before, all that could have been, and how close and how far away are those I love in a place made holy by thier rest.

The sense of loss will be pronounced, but so will the sense of peace. We spend a few short days wandering this earth in temporary shelter and then, and only, in death do we come to a permanent place, and end to the travels, and where heaven and earth will one day meet we find our home.