There are no bodies. No bodies for loved ones to hold, to prove to them that their husbands, wives, sons and daughters are no longer alive. My prayers surround them, the thousands of people who knew and loved the 227 airline passengers and twelve crew members who vanished over the Indian Ocean, along with the 777 jet aircraft that carried them.

I am immune to no one’s death and no one’s grief; all of it goes through me. One day I will tell the story of how I fought my way through bureaucratic barbed wire for the chance to touch my beautiful daughter before she was cremated. Yes, she was cremated. All of those decisions we had to make, not knowing what she would have wanted. How many healthy 29-year-olds have written their advance directives?

When the accident happened, I had not seen Corey in nearly a year, and our annual visit was coming up. I was not completely sure, given the state of shock I was in, that I wanted to touch Corey’s lifeless body, but I knew that there would never be another chance. It was the right thing to do, because I have looked back many, many times on that afternoon when my daughter Julia rode with me and the two of us saturated Corey’s body and the entire city of Santa Rosa in prayer and tears. The force of those prayers penetrated this world and the worlds beyond.

If I had not touched her and prayed and sung over her, I don’t think I could be one hundred percent positive that she is really not walking around somewhere. And so my prayers are set upon all who are forced to grieve without ever seeing the body of their loved one. I give thanks for all of the people who are working in their own towns and cities to remove bureaucratic obstacles that stand between grieving souls and their dearly departed.

"The god of today is a delinquent, a barn-burner, a punk with a pittance of power in a match."-- Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm"

This is the way it goes with grief. I do not doubt God's presence; I simply have long hours when I view God as a punk-ass traitor.

Eventually, birdsong arrows through the air by my left ear and slings me into gratitude. Or, in my right ear I hear the words of the Sufi sheik Sidi when Rebecca and I visited him a few weeks after Corey's fatal accident. "Why did God take Corey?" I wept, in the dry Northern California afternoon.

"God did not take her," he answered instantly, his weathered face a map of souls. "God does not take people; God allows things to happen."

I don't care. The why doesn't matter. As Corey has plainly admonished me in dreamtime, she can't come back. That is the reality to be grasped, and whenever I try, it stretches my insides like a small rubber diaphram being pulled over an opening that is much too wide. A chasm that, most days, I can't cross over. But in the interest of sanity, and because my bruised heart insists upon battering itself against the bones of my ribcage, I give it all I've got.

My old friend Deb and I have a long check-in, and just when I think I am going to get out of that phone call without having to "go there," she asks point-blank: How are you doing with your grief process?

The answer comes without a thought: Some days it feels like unbearably fresh grief, striking new, the cruel amputation all over again. Other moments, there is a choir of muscular angels inside me. I am not a person who has ever had mood swings, who feels a lot of ups and downs, and so the lack of equilibrium is unnerving. I have to dig down deep to find the stamina to carry it all. As Dan said last night, it is like sending pile drivers deep into the core of the earth to anchor the currents that feel like spiritual warfare.

"You must go at your life with a broadax," Annie Dillard says in "Holy the Firm." It is a slim volume that is giving me some kind of solace, if only because she writes from a ledge that is raw and celebrates the blemishes of a moment.

I see how grief has etched itself permanently across my face so that even when I smile--and I do smile, and laugh--it is apparent that the expression is merely passing through a larger landscape of pain and sorrow and loss. Or so it seems to me. I believe that Corey knows how hard we all are trying to be okay with the loss of her, to find a way to not believe that we have lost her, and I often stand in front of her photographs on the altar at the end of my hallway and say, "I'm trying, honey, I'm trying. I'm trying to get there."

Today I am in St. Louis, Missouri, where it seems that no one cares about offering real cream or milk for coffee: it is Coffeemate all the way, everywhere, the neat containers of non-dairy liquid that makes coffee and tea turn white; nevermind what is in that stuff. In fact, whatever is in it is not required to be listed on the label of each tablespoon-sized plastic pot; the label is reserved mainly to be sure you know that it is in fact the tried-and-true Nestle's Coffeemate.

Something good happened last Saturday. I cannot speak of it yet, because I am waiting for it to become more real. But I feel a part of me agreeing to make a shift towards a certain kind of love that perhaps God has finally decided to sprinkle over this spring. 

My seatmate on the plane coming out here spoke of her grandchildren and said, "I will live on in them." And it is true that we will live on in unseen ways; Corey lives on in our memories of her. She lives in my heart, whether I am in flat, dry, Missouri or wet, rocky Appalachia.

"Part of every misery is so to speak the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer, but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. -- CS Lewis, "A Grief Observed"