Easter Triduum (Part 2): Death

Holy Saturday has traditionally been a very quiet day for me. Quiet, contemplative, and waiting. This morning, I woke up thinking about Our Lady cleaning the wounds of Christ and preparing his body for burial, and I wondered if this act helped her to cope with the reality of his death. I then thought about what it would have been like if I had done the work of preparing Lizzy’s body for burial and promptly ran, mentally screaming, from the prospect.

Burial is a necessary part of death, not for the dead but for the living. The need to bury our dead and to mark and honor the place is among the oldest of civilized human behavior. The stone circles dotting Europe were instrumental in the death and burial rites of people dating back to four and five thousand years before the birth of Christ. When you think about these ancient mouths of rock, the term “silent as the tomb” thunders through your skull and you try desperately to hear the answers embedded in their patient silence.

Yesterday, I watched the online celebration of the Lord’s Passion at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC. In his homily, the priest spoke about the suffering of Our Lady being even greater than that of Christ because she herself was only human (not simultaneously divine), and she was forced to watch helplessly as the body of her child was ripped apart and slaughtered. The song “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” played its slow, mournful dirge, and the camera lingered on the Shrine’s Pieta statue.

Gazing numbly at the computer screen, I remembered myself kneeling before this same statue a year ago, my hands open in raw supplication and my heart throbbing with the fresh imperative of my grief as I stared at this woman whose suffering was so intimately similar and yet so transcendent to my own. After all, Lizzy’s body was destroyed in the process of people trying to save her life, not to take it. And yet, I had held Lizzy’s body as Our Lady had held Christ’s, and in that single act, we were the same.

I wonder if Mary knew what would happen and why her Son had to do what he did. Theology differs on this answer. But knowing or not knowing, Mary still could understand and respect the decision of a grown man who chose to sacrifice his life in order to redeem life itself. For me, it is difficult to accept Lizzy’s death because I don’t believe she chose to die. I also know that Lizzy’s life will not reverberate and echo through the centuries, transforming human life and culture in innumerable ways. Lizzy was a two-year-old little girl: not a martyr, not a prophet, and not a god. How can I possibly understand why Lizzy’s death matters as compared with the death of someone like Jesus Christ?

And here is where the rage and the bitterness enter in. I don’t believe Lizzy chose to die; I believe her life was stolen from her by disease. I believe she was too young to die, and her extreme youth is only part of why most of the world will never even know she existed. How do I explain the fact that Lizzy died before she ever grew old enough to have the opportunity to influence the world in profound and lasting ways? How do I accept that she now numbers only among the billions of children who have never reached their third birthday?

All of this leads only to the question of why and my fury at the waste and futility of it all. If she was going to be taken from me so soon, why give her to me in the first place? Why let me fall so head over heels in love with her and her with me only to rip us apart two years later?

Which leads me to the fundamental existential question: What was the point in Lizzy’s life when it was amputated just as it was beginning? What is the point in having children at all when you are giving them life only so that they can one day suffer and die? And, if you’re like me, you may even get to watch it happen.

There are days when I want to drown in the utter rage and waste of it. There are days when I don’t know how to deal with my vast and aching desire to have more children for fear that it would be a selfish act. But most days, there is just the infinite panorama of missing Lizzy and of knowing that I have to live every single second for the rest of my life without her.

This day is sick and brimming with missing Lizzy and the life that I had with her. The quiet is broken only by Cecilia who doesn’t know that her older sister is dead and that she, herself, is blind–but simply loves and laughs and cries because she is consumed by nothing more than her eternal present. By contrast, I am consumed by so much thought and regret and grief and fear that my brain is on constant overload. Every day, I come up with more unanswered and unanswerable questions and every day, I go to sleep more and more unsatisfied.

I cannot get this phrase “quiet as the tomb” out of my head. I have stood in front of one of the world’s oldest stone tombs in County Clare, Ireland, and I have felt an immense fullness to its silence. I think tombs are quiet not because the people inside of them can no longer speak, but maybe because we just don’t know how to hear the answers they have to give us. Maybe they are waiting, in time without meaning, until the day when we are no longer deaf and blind to what they have to show us.

And maybe tombs are actually portals and their silence is really a password.

So today I will try to listen to what Lizzy has to tell me. And if I am too deaf and blind to hear what she has to say, then maybe I can listen to Cecilia, who is much closer to Lizzy and to God than I am. And maybe there are some answers in the fathomless blue of Cecilia’s eyes, which cannot see what we can–but perhaps through that–can see infinitely more.