The day after Epiphany, a friend of my extended family—the kind of friend who would appear at family gatherings when I was a kid, the kind of friend who felt like family—died alone. He’d been a drifter, to use my family’s language, but that didn’t keep us from loving and welcoming him.
My sister told me that he died in his apartment—not the apartment he’d recently been evicted from, but the “dump of an apartment” he’d landed in. She told me that drugs and alcohol were involved, and that they’re not sure if his death was an accident or he’d intended it.
The day before in worship we’d sung Charles Wesley’s hymn “Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies”—“Dark and cheerless is the morn, unaccompanied by thee / joyless is the day’s return, till thy mercy’s beams I see”—and three days later I grieved the dark, cheerless morn when our friend lost his life, when he perhaps decided that living no longer mattered.
