Page 5 - Qavah

His enthusiasm helped set new goals for the church, by the time he’d transferred out of the parish, he'd
had the church publish a magazine and set up a library, among other things. Everything in the church
seemed to thrive off his patronage, particularly the choir. He exercised a function and fulfilled a mission.

He was truly good; good in his humility and complete lack of pretension.

His charity was wide as the sky, and wherever there was human suffering, human misfortune, the
sympathy of Fr. Anoop bent above it as the firmament bends above the earth. Never one to be confined

by the presupposed shackles of jurisdiction, as it were, his piety knew little limit. He had so much more
to offer though; a bountiful priest who kept on giving, never lacking in spirit or faith. He recognized all
too well the cumulative effect of persistent efforts, that every small change would ultimately add up to a
formidable aggregate. Most of us who knew him would go as far as to state that he wouldn’t have

questioned the will of the God he’d set out to serve, doubted maybe but never questioned. The barometer
of his faith tilted ever so heavily in the favour of unwavering belief.

What I fear now more than ever is forgetting him. As impossible the idea may seem now, life is simply

made up of too many memories; many of them keep slipping from us, stronger memories build upon the
weaker ones but such reinforcement is subject to the assured decay of time.

I suppose there’ll always be a little flicker inside there though, somewhat like the small glowing embers

you see after a fire dies down. And some moments may spark these memories back to life, like a book he
once lent me or the pulpit for that matter. But those will fade in time too, a fact which is in itself perhaps
the biggest tragedy of death.

It’ll be difficult getting used to verb conjugation too, “He was”, “He used to be"; the subtle yet obvious
thrust that rules of language impose in that regard. The past tense seems all too jarring. I imagine the
shock would eventually taper off, leaving in its wake a hollowness left by the fact of his death.

They say when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills
your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.
There wouldn’t be anything wrong though with not being able to make sense of any of this. It’s all too
human to doubt the tethering of our faith when confronted with the loss of someone we deeply cared

about. It’s more a testament of the affection we had for him than it is an indictment of the fallibility of
our faith. His loss deserves the collective prolonged grief of all of us he ministered to. I'd argue keeping
the pain of his loss fresh is better and is the more loving act. His memory deserves nothing less. We will
learn in time, however, to better manage our grief and pain and focus on the celebration of the life he

lived and the certain afterlife.