Perhaps if they didn’t say, ‘It’s God plan,’ there would just be an uncomfortable silence. Perhaps that’s why they fill it with words. Even if the words crack and splinter, breaking apart in our hands.

How easily the words crumble, revealing they were hollow inside. How often we patch up grief with platitudes.

Real grief is filled with silence, with the unspoken, with that which cannot be named. Grief is filled with emptiness; it bursts at the seams with it, floods the nighttime hours with it. It is an eerie silence and only the brave enter the inner sanctum of grief’s temple.

Must we fill this sacred space with clutter, with useless words that land with a dull thud between us like dead weight? Must we duck and weave, afraid to feel the true depth of sorrow, afraid to face what grief wants to show us?

The hardest part of grief is the waiting. I sit in the silence, waiting for grief to catch up to me like an old friend, waiting for the feelings to surface like inquisitive fish, waiting for the physical reaction to the revelation that someone I loved is gone.

I’m waiting for him too. Regardless of what others say about ‘God’s plan’, and regardless of whether God really did plan this or simply let things run their course without intervening, I am waiting for him. Because even if there is no reason and no meaning, he is all I’ve got. So I wait, and I weep, and sometimes words spill out in the flood of emotion. Afterwards, there is silence, and I sit steeped in it.

There is something else in the silence. There is the sense of someone nearby. He does not speak—he knows better than that—but he is there beside me, as if he has always been there and I did not notice it until now. He sits, steeped in the same silence as me. My heart screams and splinters and breaks apart like brittle pottery, and he listens. He is attentive. He is present.

As tears overflow, he is weeping too.

I tell God this is unfair, and he nods, his cheeks wet. I say I am lonely and afraid of the future, and he takes my hand in his. When I run out of words, he wraps his arm around my shoulders like a blanket. He doesn’t answer my questions. He doesn’t have to. His comfort is unmistakable, almost tangible. He is with me in the grief.

The sound of silence has become golden to me. It is the place where I meet with grief, look it in the eye, and let it speak. It is also the place where God waits for me and weeps with me. He welcomes me in his arms—arms big enough to hold the whole world, arms big enough for my grief.

Steph Penny