Good Friday

It’s Good Friday and I feel every inch of that weight in my bones today. I am physically spent, having endured nearly two days with a blinding migraine and what I’m fairly sure is turning into a kidney infection. I am emotionally withered, having used the entire week helping to make arrangements and phone calls on behalf of dad so that he could grieve in his own ways. Losing half of your heart is not helped by making lists or saying the words, “she passed away” every time you call someone, so I didn’t want that for him. I mean, I didn’t want it for me, either, but I wanted it less for him. Now my lists are mostly done but I am ravaged.

Good Friday has always been such a strange title for today. It certainly didn’t feel good to anyone who experienced it. And I’m sure it didn’t seem as if anything good could come of it at the time. I can think of a thousand words to describe this day, but good wouldn’t even make the top 100.

Poor Mary stood at the foot of a cross and watched her son die in agony, absolutely powerless to help him, to ease his suffering or even to properly say goodbye to her child. She must have felt so alone. I thought I would surely die from the pain of losing my unborn child, so I truly cannot fathom the pain of losing a child who’s grown into a friend, a friend who has become a teacher, a teacher who became the leader of a multitude. I’m sure everything in her body was screaming, but she stayed. She stayed because that was her baby and her baby needed his mama.

John was Jesus’s best friend and he took on the charge to watch over his best friend’s mother as Jesus bled and groaned and suffered. He must have been so grieved, so frightened, so determined not to fail his friend, but he stayed. He stayed because he knew that his friend would have stayed with him, would have taken any charge, would have wept at the ground were it John’s blood falling there instead of the blood of Jesus.

Mary Magdalene loved Jesus as a man, a teacher and a friend. He was probably the first person in her life who hadn’t immediately judged her for being a woman. She was raised in a culture where women were viewed as property and expected to be silent, penitent members of church who did not teach, but this man lived in diametric opposition to every tenet which had held her captive. Watching him die and imagining the return to a life without that freedom must have been excruciating, but she stayed. She stayed because that’s what you do when someone you truly love is dying. Losing even a second of time together is unthinkable when you know that time is not a resource but the most precious of commodities.

There were others there, surely, but those three call to me in my grief and my pain. It surely feels as if the world has ended, as if this loss has shattered me and will consume the brittle pieces, as if there is no possible way to carry on in the face of these feelings. We are taught that, when Jesus died, the sky went black in the middle of the day and the earth shook. Maybe it was meant as an allegory but, for me, that is exactly what happened to my world when my mother left it.

I know the story has a happy ending, although I doubt it felt very happy to John or Jesus’s mother or Mary Magdalene. It couldn’t have been joy they felt once they realized that resurrection did not mean restoration. The person they loved so deeply might have been alive, but he wasn’t going to be with them anymore, either. Life would truly never be the same. Better than they’d envisioned on that bleak and bitter Friday night, maybe. But not the same. Every day of the rest of their own lives would be forever changed by the ending of the life of he whom their hearts loved best.

As I lie in bed in the darkness, begging for this migraine to either subside or just kill me outright, I am also waiting. Waiting for a sign that there is life on the other side of this inner darkness, this meager and weary existence. I pray for resurrection, not for my mother who fought and won her battle and as such earned her rest, but for myself. I pray for a return to light and joy, to color and love, to music and hope, to laughter and peace. I imagine that Mary, John and Mary must have felt the same as the sun rose on Saturday and the world just went on living without Jesus.

May Sunday come soon.