Enough.
Look, the news media inundates us every day with endless tales of genuine horror and suffering, because in a world with billions of people that will always be happening somewhere. Life is and will always be fundamentally unfair, and the vale of tears filled with a never-ending parade of horrors. And yet, it's also true that for the median person on Earth, life is much better today than ever before in human history.
My own story is exactly one such example – the fact that I'm devastated to lose my son to a crippling injury highlights another fact–that this very thing has become so rare in my country as to be "unimaginable." We should rejoice at this! Losing a child used to be so unremarkably commonplace that everyone, even emperors and kings, routinely suffered it until approximately yesterday.
The correct adjective for the tragedy I'm experiencing is not "unimaginable" but unfathomable. I can imagine it just fine because it's happening to me, and you can imagine it too now because I'm describing it to you. And because we can imagine it, we can turn and face it, and, with God's grace, we can lift up our cross and bear it, somehow.
But what none of us can do is to measure–to fathom–the depth of it.
Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea.
— Elder Sophrony of Essex
***
I’ve heard a lot of bad eulogies in my time. There’s at least three different ways to give a bad eulogy.
First, I could pour all of my efforts into denying every ounce of grief, insisting instead on “celebrating the life” of Nikolas, pursuing the absurd goal of making sure nobody gets sad at the funeral of an eight year old boy.
Second, I could robotically recite a list of dates and anecdotes, leaving you with little more than a disjointed Wikipedia summary of Nikolas’ life.
Last and worst, I could make this all about me, making myself the main character at my own son’s funeral.
I regret to inform you that I will surely fail in each and every one of these ways, so settle in for a bad eulogy. Forgive me. (...)
Many of you know me as a man of deep faith, but I confess to have long been plagued by moments of doubt, moments that are the darkest when thoughts turn to the inevitability of my own death. It is of some relevance that I am also possessed of a pathological phobia of falling from great heights. It is therefore no surprise that when I imagine the experience of death, I picture myself falling into a great yawning abyss. I see myself falling, falling, falling, headlong into that great nothing, and God is not there to catch me.
