After my last piece, I meant to leave behind these theological reflections and return to more secular, politically charged commentary. But two major events have held me here longer than I expected. For the first time, I find myself stepping into reflections on death itself. Sure, I once wrote a eulogy of sorts for a dearly departed professor, but that piece centered on the person. While this one will also center on another, I find myself looking at death differently — as a constant nuisance, an unwelcome interruption that refuses to cease.
Less than two months ago, my faith community experienced the loss of Almage Severe. He was not a figure of renown in the wider world, but within our circle, he was profoundly loved. My association with him traces back to the 1990s, as I stood on the threshold of adolescence. Severe appeared with his wife, two sons, and a daughter. Although I now know the family had not yet arrived at Beraca Seventh-day Adventist Church when I first began attending in 1990, after moving to Queens from Brooklyn, they are so firmly anchored in my recollections that, in my mind, they have become inseparable from the fabric of that formative period.
I cannot say exactly when I first met the Severe family.
My inability to recall the specifics and to sort out these details with precision is also a reflection of how I process the past. I have never been known for an exceptional memory when it comes to how things were. I am far more reliable when it comes to what was said and spoken.
I remember spontaneous weekend gatherings where my father and Severe would bring the boys to the park. I cannot recall what they talked about, but I remember Severe’s friendly demeanor and the afternoons spent playing in the park with the boys. I am left with the impression that it was a very good time. After all, what boy would not be glad to see his church friends on a day other than the one reserved for services?
Beyond those Sunday afternoons, I essentially grew up in church with Severe serving as a kind of uncle figure. I attended youth choir rehearsals and Pathfinders meetings alongside his children. We even engaged in unsanctioned wrestling matches in the church basement, where more than a few tables were broken during our reenactments of tables, ladders, and chairs matches. In truth, the church should have charged us for the amount of furniture we managed to destroy.
I eventually grew into who I am. Throughout all those years, the nature of my relationship with Severe never changed. He was always a respected uncle. Some might even say that, given the closeness of my friendship with his children, he was a father figure of sorts. My encounters with him were always marked by happiness and warmth. He was simply a joyful man.
Over the past few years, he was in and out of the hospital, though never for very long. While I understood the seriousness of what he was fighting, it never seemed that things would take a turn for the worse, at least not so quickly. When I heard once again that he was back in the hospital, I, like many others, assumed it would follow the same pattern as before and that he would soon return. After all, he is woven into my most memorable past. He is Severe. He would be here for a long time.
I remember mentioning to a friend that I could not imagine the generation we grew up knowing as parents eventually being gone. Severe is not the first. In fact, I have had the misfortune of hearing of the passing of contemporaries and even attending a few funerals. While all of these losses were major shocks, this one was a shock of a different kind. This one felt like a disappearance.
About two weeks before his passing, I crossed paths with Severe. I did not always have the chance to speak with him, though I often glimpsed him from afar. This time was different. I stood on the church steps as he stepped out of his car. Recognizing the car and remembering his unmistakable taste in brands, I laughed and called out, “Only you could pull this off.” He smiled, that familiar easy smile that will always accompany his memory, and answered in his gentle way, “You know, you know.”
He was not arrogant. He was not a showoff. But he took quiet pleasure in his little luxuries. Deacon, usher, singer, and preacher, he shared his many gifts with us. We, in turn, were grateful for his presence and will surely miss him. We feel robbed. Every time we lose someone who seemed as if they could have stayed with us a little longer, we are confronted once again by the bitterness of loss, and by the reality that we, our families, and our friends must endure these absences without the full help of the community we once imagined would be there.
Once again, we find ourselves confronted with the realities of loss. Despite our fervent prayers, hopes, and expectations for a miraculous turn, we are left to contend with the passing of a remarkably gracious woman, whose gentle demeanor and soft-spoken kindness were evident to all who encountered her. Marie Lourdes Francois was never positioned at the forefront, yet her steady presence occupied a special place within the community. I join friends and family in mourning a loss that feels particularly acute, grieving someone whose life, by all reasonable measures, should have extended well beyond this moment.
The world remains a profoundly disordered place, often enveloping us in recurring cycles of grief, frustration, and unmet expectation.
Francois, like all members, had a specific place where she and her husband would sit. We would always meet at the sanctuary door, where I would greet her with a kiss on the cheek, a gesture deeply rooted in Haitian culture, especially toward those we hold in high honor and respect. While I generally aim to make everyone feel my presence, I felt an extra measure of appreciation whenever I encountered her. Like Severe, she had watched me grow from a child into a church administrator. The church family is one of those rare bodies where a genuine familial bond is felt without the need to ever articulate it aloud. Francois was not only special to her family and to the congregation. She was special to me.
Death is a terrible force, a foul power that enacts separation through destruction. It tears our loved ones from us. They vanish. They become the disappeared. Certainly, their bodies are placed underground or sealed within mausoleums whose locations we can mark. Yet what we would find, were we to search, would not be the ones we lost. They have disappeared.
But we who are alive and remain remember. We, who must look into the faces of grieving families, who must sift through the memories of how we lived alongside these persons, remember. Disappeared but not forgotten, for they are held in memory. And if we, in our helplessness, remember the disappeared, how much more will they be remembered by the One who is equipped with resurrection power.
True remembrance will culminate not only in the resurrection of the dead. It can also be said that because of the One who truly remembers, such remembrance will ultimately bring about the reappearance of the disappeared.