I Watched The Cars Pull Away

The last one goes at about half past four.

There is a stretch of twenty minutes before it that you know extremely well. Coats. Somebody cannot find something. Two people standing in the hall having the conversation that always happens in the hall. Somebody says they should have left an hour ago.

Then the door, and the cold coming in, and the engine, and the lights going down the road.

And then you turn round and go back into a house that had nine people in it four minutes ago.

Here is the part nobody sees and nobody asks about. The next hour.

Not the evening. The evening is manageable; there is something on and you will put it on. The hour immediately after, when the house is still warm from all of them, when there are cups everywhere, and when the quiet is not the ordinary quiet of a Tuesday but a specific and new quiet made entirely out of people having just left.

You have never said one word about that hour to anybody.

Let me say the first thing plainly. That hour is real and it is hard and it is not self pity, and a man who dreads it is not a man who has gone soft.

Forgotten as a dead man out of mind

There is a line in the psalms about being out of people's thoughts, and it is far blunter than most people expect from Scripture.

I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel. (Psalm 31:12, King James Version)

Forgotten as a dead man out of mind. That is an extraordinary sentence to find in the Bible. It is not a complaint about somebody being unkind. It is a man saying he has fallen out of people's attention entirely, the way the dead do, and that he is aware of it.

And then: I am like a broken vessel. A thing that was useful and is now in the corner.

Nobody in the text corrects him, and nobody suggests he is being dramatic, and the psalm does not rush him.

You are able to say the thing about being out of mind, and it is written into Psalm 31:12 in exactly those words with no correction attached. The written word keeps a plain statement about being forgotten, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an older man read that without deciding he is being pitiful.

And notice that the psalm is a prayer. He is saying it to somebody.

You have somewhere to say it rather than only somewhere to feel it, and Psalm 31:12 is addressed to God rather than muttered to a room. Scripture puts the whole sentence inside a prayer, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives what a man says to nobody in a hallway.

What that hour actually is

Now let me be exact about the hour, because naming a thing accurately makes it smaller.

Two things happen at once and they work against each other.

The first is physical. Your house has been running at nine people and it drops to one. Sound, movement, heat, all of it gone inside four minutes. A body notices that as a change of environment and responds to it, and the response feels like loss because the mechanism for a sudden absence is the same mechanism.

The second is that the comparison is available. On an ordinary Tuesday the house is quiet and it is simply the house. On that particular afternoon it is quiet in direct comparison with an hour ago, and the comparison is what does the damage.

You are standing in a comparison rather than in a fact, and the written word lets a man say plainly that he has gone out of people's minds. Psalm 31:12 states the whole thing without argument, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells an older man the difference between an empty house and a verdict about his life.

And here is the second thing, which is the one that has probably been unsaid the longest.

Underneath the hour is a piece of arithmetic. You know roughly how many more of these there will be. Not morbidly; it is simply a thing a man of your age knows, and it sits underneath the afternoon and it makes the leaving heavier than it would otherwise be.

That arithmetic is not a sign of anything wrong. It is what it is to be at your end of a life, and nobody says it out loud, and so every man doing it thinks he is the only one.

You were never the only one doing that arithmetic, and Scripture puts a man's plainest sentence about being forgotten into the middle of a prayer. Psalm 31:12 does not flinch, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the arithmetic as much as in the afternoon.

Say it out loud before you sit down

So here is the assignment, and the timing of it is the whole thing.

Say out loud what the quiet house is like, and say it to God before you sit down.

Before you sit down. That is the specific instruction. There is a moment, about four minutes after the last car, when a man comes back inside and stands for a second and then sits down, and everything that happens after the sitting down happens in silence.

Do it in that gap. Standing in the hall, with your coat possibly still on, in whatever words come. Something like: it is far too quiet in here and I do not like it at all.

You are able to say the plain thing out loud in an empty hall, and it has never once been self pity to describe a house accurately. Psalm 31:12 puts the bluntest possible sentence into a prayer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is there in the four minutes after the last engine.

And I want to say why out loud rather than felt. A thing felt in a quiet house expands to fill the house. A thing said out loud has a size, because it took a certain number of words and then it finished.

That is the entire difference and it is a considerable one.

You are able to make a thing finite by saying it, and a sentence has never once been able to fill a whole house the way a feeling can. Psalm 31:12 gives a man a fixed number of words for the worst of it and then stops, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody standing in a hall having said four seconds of the truth.

I am not promising the hour stops being hard. It will be hard. What changes is that it is an hour in which something was said rather than an hour spent entirely inside your own head.

You are giving the hour a sentence rather than letting it have the whole of you, and the written word keeps a man's complaint on the page at full strength. Psalm 31:12 says forgotten as a dead man out of mind and nobody softens a syllable of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives it standing up in a hallway.