This morning, as the late December dawn broke over my backyard in Washington state, I video called my friends Therese and Camilla. They were already in their own darkness, having already spent the short day in Sweden and the UK mourning the loss of our dear friend Jennifer.
We cried together as we remembered the kind, gentle soul who had brought so much beauty to the world. She was generous and compassionate with her words and her possessions. She loved well and she embraced people with the love and dignity of her Savior. More than once, I remember her talking about a friend whose burdens were beyond her capacity to bear. She would shrug her shoulders and say, “I just listen and I hug.” She was like that. She gifted people with her presence, her eyes listening, her heart responding, her hands reaching out to hold.
As another Californian in Sweden, she went out of her way to welcome me to Malmö, meeting me for coffee when I barely knew her. I’ll never forget her asking me how I was adjusting to the move. When I struggled to say everything was great, she looked me in the eyes and said softly, “I am learning its ok to not be ok.” It was a gift.
Jennifer loved to swim in the ocean, even when it was cold. I remember asking how she could swim in freezing water, and she said something about how you would not swim very much in Sweden if you were always waiting for it to get warmer. One hot day in June we met at the docks and just jumped in. I didn’t waste time thinking about cold Nordic water. I just did it because she was there with me. That was her gift to me.
She also encouraged me to pursue my graduate studies, even when I was struggling to justify diving so deeply into an academic program that seemed to have little economic value. What do you do with a master’s degree in the emergence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam in Europe? She championed the act of learning for the sake of learning, making art because art matters. Beauty for the sake of beauty.
She had a childlike faith that deepened over the time I knew her. She often said something like “God’s got this.” She rested in that truth, even when the circumstances prompted others to fret. During the pandemic lockdowns she started a routine of calling a friend to pray every day. Her Facebook intro simply says, “Read the whole Bible. More than once.” She trusted her loving Heavenly Father. Yesterday, when I heard that her life was drawing to an end, that her oxygen levels were sinking to an unsustainable level and that her lungs were struggling to keep her heart alive, I prayed that she would sense God’s presence in her hospital room. When I heard the news that she had died, I imagined Him walking into her room, taking her by the hand, and leading her into Heaven.
I know that He has healed every wound in her body and heart. I know that He has satisfied the longings that this world could never fill. I know that she is drinking deeply of the Heavenly waters that she only began to taste here on Earth. I know that she is Home.
And yet I grieve because I miss her. I just miss her. I want to call her up and talk to her, to walk down rainy cobble streets in the old part of Malmö and grab coffee at one of the many coffee shops near her apartment. I no longer live in Sweden and she no longer lives on this Earth, but I long to defy space and time and walk into her Swedish apartment, see the hundreds of plants she has nurtured, the stacks of books she wanted to read, the candles that gave the room a cozy glow, even on the darkest day in December.
The girls and I got to know Jennifer through a little book club we started a few months after I arrived in Sweden. I think it was Camilla’s idea. The four of us randomly arrived at the park for a women’s social event that no one else showed up for. We talked and Camilla mentioned that she wanted to have a book club, but maybe not just to read books, maybe to get together and talk and go to spa or get lunch or just walk around the park together. So, in a spontaneous moment, we decided to be friends, to get to know each other, to share a little bit of our lives together. I suggested we name our little group the SWeAR club, Sometimes We Actually Read club, and our little joke turned into one of the greatest experiments in intentional friendship I have ever known. Over the next two years we listened to each other’s life stories. We made dinner for each other. We laughed together. We prayed for each other, and occasionally, we talked about the books we were reading. We just never managed to read the same book at the same time.
This morning, the three remaining survivors of our little group met virtually, one more time, to process our deep sense of gratitude and the loss we felt. It was the beginning of healing. I am grateful. Jennifer blessed my life tremendously and I only wish that she could have lived to bless more people. God knows. As she would have said, “He has got this,” but maybe she would add, “But its ok to not be ok.”
Jennifer died of Covid 19 while visiting a friend in Maine on December 18, 2021.
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