​Love is stronger than death

Marital love. Photo: open sources

Irina Chernova asks:

Does any bond remain between husband and wife after death?

Archpriest Vasily Kucher answers:

This question comes up quite often. And almost always, there is a certain anxiety behind it. People feel as though death has simply severed something from them, leaving everything they shared in the past.

But consider what the Church says during the Sacrament of Marriage. The Church asks God to preserve the couple “in peace and oneness of mind” and recalls the righteous, praying that they may rejoice and be glad, as Rachel rejoiced. In other words, marriage is not regarded from the outset as some kind of contract limited to earthly life. Moreover, when we commemorate the departed, we ask God to grant them rest in a place where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing.

Notice that we do not ask God to help us forget them. We ask Him to grant them rest – that is, to preserve them alive in His presence.

And there lies the answer. For with God, “all live to Him” (Luke 20:38). If husband and wife are alive in God, then what united them is alive as well.

The Apostle Paul, incidentally, says quite plainly: “Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13:8). Everything else, as he writes in the same passage, will pass away – knowledge, prophecies, and so forth. But love remains.

There is, however, something else we must acknowledge. The Lord told the Sadducees that in the resurrection, people “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30). But this refers to the aspects of marriage bound up with earthly life – the body, everyday domestic concerns, and the bearing of children. Those things do indeed come to an end. Yet that does not mean the people themselves cease to exist, or that the union through which they became one flesh over decades of shared life simply disappears.

It is no accident that the Church entrusts a widow or widower with the most important task of all – prayer.

And this is not merely a comforting ritual. It is that very bond continuing in a new form. Only now, instead of conversations over dinner, it finds expression through prayerful commemoration.

It is important to understand that when we commemorate the departed, we are not simply remembering the past. We are continuing to care for them. And that care finds its highest expression in submitting their names for commemoration at the Proskomedia, praying for them, giving alms in their memory, and perhaps even forgiving someone they themselves never had the chance to forgive.

So the bond does more than simply endure. It becomes stronger and purer, because all the petty irritations and hurts of everyday life fall away.

And let me add something that many people have probably felt themselves. The longing that remains is itself a testimony to eternity. For if there were truly nothing beyond the grave, there would be nothing left to ache for.

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