the sweet by and by

Just before midnight my phone rang. It woke me and it took me awhile to locate why I had wakened. I could hear laughter from my daughter's room where she was with her friend. Then I realised that it was my phone ringing. It was the children's mum. Their granda was in hospital and she had just got the call that he was about to die and she was coming to pick them up. From out of the blue. Out of the black Saturday night.
My daughter's friend went home and I woke my son. They didn't know what to make of it. They were stunned. These words suddenly coming genuinely out of my mouth. They were all wrong.
When their mum arrived in meltdown something cracked in the ice of what I said to them and they buckled, folded and let loose their emotions. Tears came together as the world suddenly crashed upon them. He had died already.
In the car there was thick silence and a return to puzzlement. They were taking a journey by car, a normal car journey east on the m8. Words were spoken, recriminations and ifs and buts and whys as the night traffic moved people outside home from a party, or taxiing them on deeper into the promise of SaturdaynightSundaymorning.  
Only when we arrived at the hospital and the kids saw the weightless peace settled on their granda's face did the deluge of wrongness in the world come at them again. Everything was wrong in that room....
And here I will leave those moments of raw communion where they lay. Among family, where I myself was suddenly included again.
I was asked to come, and I did want to say goodbye to a man who I'd shared a lot of my life alongside. The grandfather of my children. I wanted to be there to catch the grief of my children and hold it and rock it out into the room where it belonged.
It was not about me, and I have hesitated to write this. It was about the passing of a deeply religious man who was suddenly made absent in all our lives. He was a baptist, like his mother before him: like his daughter left behind. A song that his mother had sung in praise and wonder was The Sweet By and By. We sang it in the dim hospital light gathered around him. Low and sweet in tuneless emotion. Such love in his leaving. He was at rest, somewhere in that sweet by and by. 

As we left through the A&E, where SaturdaynightSundaymorning stumbled past us with a bloody head, I could feel the change in my children. They had witnessed death for the first time, a worldquake. Their night had been split open into some new thing that transformed them in an instant.
And I was so proud of them, for they were perfect in their grief, they let it course through them from the pit of this thing that has given us life. This thing that takes it from us. They let it come, they let it be a recognition and a solace to the others in the room. They were able to be there and present where and when it mattered: in this breach between body and soul. It was real and it was sudden and they did not hide.