At funerals, in the middle of grief, people often cry out something that sounds almost irrational:

“<name>, where are you? Where are you?!”

The body is there. Everyone knows what has happened. And yet, no one says, “He is gone.” Instead, we ask a question that cannot be answered.

“Where are you?”

I used to think this was just emotion overflowing. But the more I paid attention, the more it felt like something deeper than grief — something almost instinctive, something that rises from a place we don’t fully understand.

Because this is not unique to us. Across cultures and across history, people have mourned like this. They call the name of the one who died. They speak to them. They ask questions. They search for presence, even when they know presence has been broken.

And then I noticed something that felt almost unsettling in its familiarity.

In the first pages of Scripture, after Adam and Eve disobey, God walks into the garden and asks:

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)

God was not asking for information. He knew where Adam was. The question was not about location.

It was about the presence that had been lost.

Something had happened that Scripture later describes as death — not physical death, but spiritual death. A rupture. A separation. A breaking of nearness between God and man.

And the first words God speaks into that rupture are not accusations, not explanations, not judgment.

They are a question:

“Where are you?”

It sounds strangely similar to what we cry at funerals.

When we mourn, we stand in front of a body and ask, “Where are you?” because we feel that the person we knew is no longer there in the way they should be.

In Eden, God stands before the man He created and asks, “Where are you?” because the man He knew is no longer there in the way he should be.

In both moments, the question is not about geography. It is about a presence that has been broken.

It is almost as if, when we cry out at death, we echo something very old. Something that began not at gravesides, but in a garden. The first time, presence was lost. The first time, the relationship was fractured. The first time “death” entered the human story.

We ask the same question God asked.

“Where are you?”

And maybe that is not accidental.

Maybe it reveals something about us: that we are not made to accept absence easily. We are made for presence, for closeness, for being-with. And when that is torn apart — whether by sin in Eden or by death at a funeral — the instinctive response is the same.

We search. We call out. We refuse to accept the loss quietly.

But the story does not end there.

I believe that the same God who asked “Where are you?” in the garden did not walk away from that rupture. The rest of Scripture moves toward restoring what was broken, toward healing that separation, toward bringing back the presence that was lost.

In that sense, the question “Where are you?” is not only grief. It is also longing.

And longing carries hope.

Because it suggests that, somewhere deep within us, we still expect presence to be restored.

Disclaimer

This is a personal reflection, not a theological argument. It comes from observation, reading, and connecting patterns I’ve noticed, and it is meant simply as a thought, not as doctrine.