If you live long enough, you’ll stand beside two very different graves.

At one of them you bury someone whose life was cut short. It ended too early. It ended before it had finished what it was so obviously meant to do, and everything in you says this is wrong. At the other you bury someone old and full of years, and you weep there too — but you also find yourself giving thanks. Both are grief. They are not the same grief.

Inside of ten days this month, we were each handed one of them.

Mark’s son David died suddenly two years ago at twenty-one, while the two of us were together in China. The second anniversary of his death came last week, while Mark was in Mozambique. That same week, in John’s home, Esther Johanna — Johnny, to everyone who ever knew her — died at 103. She was John’s mother-in-law and she’d lived upstairs for the last five years. Mark said his goodbyes and got on a plane with no idea what he’d come home to: Johnny had fallen, rallied, turned, and was gone. Just that fast.

We’d like to set those two losses next to each other, because the Bible does.

Both things are true

Scripture talks about the length of a life from two directions, and you need both.

From where God sits, no life is cut short. He numbers our days. He assigned a portion to David and a portion to Johnny, and neither one took Him by surprise. The God who knows the number of hairs on your head knew every single day written for our son before one of them came to be.

And from where we sit — a place the Bible describes honestly and never scolds — a life absolutely can feel cut short. A life can also be full. Of Abraham it says he died at 175, “an old man and full of years” (Genesis 25:8). Full of what? Adventures, we think. Memories. A deep satisfaction in all of it.

Holding both at once isn’t a contradiction. It’s what Christian grief looks like.

When it’s cut short

We have a friend whose son died recently the same way David did. Mark called him. And the honest thing to tell you is that there wasn’t much to say.

You don’t become an expert in losing a son. You don’t get seasoned at it. Two years in, you’re still no good at knowing what to say to a father who just lost his boy. Christians like to tell the grieving that one day they’ll be able to comfort others in a new way, and there’s something to that — but it’s smaller and quieter than people imagine. Sometimes the whole ministry is this: you are not the only one in the world this has happened to.

There’s more weight in that than you’d think. It’s part of why Jesus is such a good Savior — He’s lived this life, all of it, every temptation and sorrow, and He sympathizes with us in our weakness (Hebrews 4:15). Someone who has actually been where you are can sit with you in a way that other people, however much they love you, simply can’t.

We think a lot about a night in Africa, on Mark’s first trip overseas after David died. A group of pastors were sitting around a meal and somebody asked what the most painful thing was that any of them had been through. Mark told them what he’d just walked through. Then another pastor spoke up. When he was twelve, marauders came into his village and made him watch while they cut off his mother’s head. His father and his brother died the same day. Orphaned at twelve. He lived on the streets, walked to another country, raised himself, walked back, ended up on the national soccer team. He’s a pastor now.

You figure out pretty quickly that you’re not the only one out there carrying something. You’ve joined a club nobody wants to be in — and it helps more than you’d expect just to know the others are in there with you.

Marking the day on purpose

The first anniversary of David’s death went by in a blur. The family was in England for a wedding — his sister married seven days later — and there was so much to do and so much noise that the day never really got observed. In some ways that was a mercy; you don’t want to sit around and stew. But it was a strange first anniversary.

The second time, Mark wanted to be deliberate about it. We were traveling and teaching at a hard clip, so he taught that morning and then asked the brothers if he could just have the afternoon and evening alone in his room. He read David’s old letters and the things he’d written. He listened to music David had recorded. He went through his phone hunting for pictures he hadn’t seen in a long, long time, and walked down memory lane.

What he came away with at the end of that day wasn’t bitterness over what was taken. It was gratitude for what was given. We got all twenty-one years.

You’re allowed to weep

One of the marvels of our faith is that weeping and rejoicing aren’t a choice — one or the other. Most of the time they’re both, at the same moment. You can rejoice from one angle and weep openly and freely before the Lord from another. This is the God who says He keeps your tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). Think about what that picture is saying. He is not embarrassed by your grief. He’s collecting it.

That afternoon in the hotel room Mark was reading Psalm 31:

“Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing.”

David the psalmist is so easy to relate to in these places. He knew what it was to lose a son.

Without psalms like that one, we’d be wide open to the accusation that days of lament and grief are somehow outside of God’s will for us. They clearly aren’t. God has done more than permit our grief — He’s handed us the words for it, for the days when we can’t find any of our own. That’s part of what it means that He’s given us everything we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), including the very worst places.

When it’s long

Johnny was born here to Norwegian immigrant parents. Her brothers and sisters called her Johnny when she was a little girl, and it stuck for a century. She moved in with us at ninety-eight.

A long life has its own losses. Her father died when she was five. The older sister who helped raise her lived to 108. In the last year and a half, she buried two of her own sons. She asked the question at the dinner table often: Why am I living so long? Why am I still here? At 103 you’ve outlived just about everybody.

Those dinner conversations kept circling back to the strange math in Genesis. Adam lived 930 years. Methuselah went the longest on record, 969. Noah made 950 — and then the flood came, and the numbers start falling. Shem, 600. Arpachshad, 438. A few generations later Peleg lived 239. Abraham, 175. Moses, 120. David died at 70 and Solomon at 80, and by then Psalm 90:10 could describe the human span the way it still runs: “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Average life expectancy in the United States today is right at eighty.

So why the drop? The Bible doesn’t come out and say, so take what follows as our best reading and not as doctrine. Johnny and John argued about it more than once over dinner.

The Garden was set up as a place where death didn’t exist — where life was lived and eternal life was secured. Death came in through the fall. But Eden’s effect didn’t stop all at once; it carried on for generations. God tied His punishment to His mercy, and while the earth was filling up and the stage was being set, He let those people live a long, long time. Those falling numbers look to us like death slowly taking root in a race that was built to live and live and live. Were their bodies different? Did they age differently? We don’t know. But we do believe the record is telling us something: we were made for life, and what we now call a normal lifespan is the measure of what sin has cost us.

Her last word

After dinner one evening, heading back upstairs to her sitting room, Johnny went down. It wasn’t a stumble — she seemed to lose herself for a second — and she broke her hip. She was in terrible pain. John got a pillow under her head and a blanket over her and sat down on the floor next to her to wait for help, and she started thanking him for the years she’d had in that house.

Then the EMTs came through the door, and she went to work on them.

“I just want you to know that I have put my faith in Jesus Christ, who has loved me and given His life for me.” She’d mention the pain in her hip, and then come right back to it: “But I want you men to know that the pain Jesus endured on the cross for my sins is far greater than the pain I’m feeling right now.” On and on she went, flat on the floor, pressing these guys to put their hope in Christ while they tried to work out how to get her down the stairs and into the ambulance.

One of them finally asked her why she was telling them all this. Maybe it unnerved him. Maybe he wanted to reassure her she wasn’t going to die. She wasn’t having any of it. She knew exactly what moment this was, and she was not going to let it pass without those men knowing where her faith was.

Forty-six hours later she was gone.

John sat on the stairs through the whole thing shaking his head, praying: Lord, when my days are short and I know it, let me have that kind of boldness about where my faith is and what my last word is going to be.

Grief and relief

John’s house is odd now. After every meal there’s still the reflex to call Johnny down to the table. Five years of routine — breakfast, lunch, dinner, a whole life arranged around being home for them — just stopped. Anybody who’s lost somebody knows that emptiness, that feeling of incompleteness.

But held up against the other grave, there’s a difference, and it’s worth saying out loud. A brother we know calls it grelief — grief and relief in the same breath. Those forty-six hours went to surgery or no surgery, hospice, round-the-clock care, what comes next. And when she was finally called home, there was real relief in it. A sense of deliverance. A sense of fullness. You don’t get that with a life cut short. There the grief comes at you straight, with nothing mixed in. Here it’s a good long life, full of days and stories and people. It’s satisfying. It is a beautiful thing to watch someone die in the faith at 103, ready to go home.

Number your days

Romans reminds us that death is tied to sin. That we age, that we decline, that we breathe our last and get gathered to our fathers — every bit of it is evidence that we need rescuing, and a reminder that this world isn’t all there is. We’re nomads here. Passing through. And one promise stands over both graves: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).

Losing David early and loving Johnny long drive us to the very same place. Number your days. Life is a vapor. God knows exactly how many you’ve got — and receiving them, giving thanks for them, and spending them well, the way Johnny did, is the best thing we can hand back to the God who gave us life and breath.