Ruth glanced down at her Fitbit and saw two hours had passed since she’d come into the church with her children. Her tights itched, and her eyelids felt heavy, which filled her with guilt.
    How could she be fighting sleep at her husband’s funeral? But she knew this fight stemmed from acute exhaustion, and from the fact there’d been few times over the past six months she’d allowed herself to sit still, because stillness meant something wasn’t getting done, and focusing on getting something done kept her from having too much time to think.
    And then, piercing the droning quiet, Ruth heard her dead husband’s voice: an audible apparition. “Hey there, girly girls,” he said. “I hope you’re being good for your mama. It’s a hot day—” Ruth was so stunned, she was unable to correlate that Chandler’s voice was not in her head but coming from her phone. Mouth dry, she glanced at her daughter’s lap. The screen framed Chandler’s familiar face. Ruth reached for it, and Sofie looked up—eyes flashing—and wrenched the phone back. All the while, the simple, now otherworldly, message continued to play: “I’m looking forward to seeing you again. It won’t be long now.”
    Ruth finally got the phone away and Sofie screamed, “No!”
    The sound reverberated off the church’s whitewashed walls, echoing just as the a cappella hymn “The City of Light” had earlier as she and her daughters filed past the caskets.
    Ruth’s cheeks burned with humiliation and grief.
    In the center of her lap, just as it had been in her daughter’s, was Chandler’s face: his dark beard, his dark skin, his dark eyes, so that he blended in with both the Colombian and Afghani cultures. His coloring was clearly passed down through Mabel, who looked more Native American than Mennonite, most of whom, Ruth knew, were German or Swiss.
    I miss you, Ruth thought, and the realization surprised her as much as hearing her dead husband’s voice coming from her phone.
    How could she miss a man who’d been parted from her for so long? For, yes, absence did make the heart grow fonder, but then, after a while, that shield of self-preservation grew thicker, and the heart forsook fondness for survival and all-consuming love for getting by. Ruth felt that she hadn’t truly missed her dead husband in four of their five years of marriage. And sometimes, when she’d missed Chandler the most, he’d been sitting in the same room.

Taken from How the Light Gets In by Jolina Petersheim. Copyright © 2019
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.