For my blog post this week I offer a meditation on my mother’s death in which Lenten themes abound. It was originally published in the Princeton Theological Review in 2007. 

Two weeks before she died, Mom asked me to cut her hair. So I perched on the back of the couch and, leaning over her, combed my fingers through her short gray locks. She wore the lilac cotton nightgown I had bought for her and submitted like a little child to every touch of my hands as, slowly, I snipped away her hair. Slim slips of silver like feathers between my fingers.

I did a bad job of it. In the end she looked more like a cancer patient than before. Yet her cousins said they loved the way her color shone, the silver mixed with dark, what to me was an image of her meekness—going gray in her mid-fifties. Mom brushed the slivers of hair from her shoulders. She had brought nothing into this world and was determined to leave with nothing. 

In photos taken prior to the final diagnosis, Mom is at ease, enjoying a summer surrounded by family. She is happy, yet not whole. Barely noticeable is the fact that she wears one glass eye, the result of a tumor removed 13 months before. Each eye glints differently. One is glassy—light flashing off the surface. The other has depth, like the gray-green stones at the bottom of a river. The shadow thrown across her face is but a picture of her brokenness, her weakness while on this earth.  

I remember sitting with my parents in the doctor’s office the day we heard the final diagnosis. A year after her eye surgery, the cancer had invaded her liver and silently grown to an inoperable size. “It’s not good,” was all Dr. Lynch could manage. Dad and I breathed slowly and spoke in measured phrases. I bit the inside of my mouth hard to keep from sobbing, wanting anything but for Mom to recognize my terror. She alone was not ashamed to display fear. Petitioning the doctor, her voice climbed high and thinned. Her legs dangled from the examination table like a little girl’s.  

Over the following weeks, my mother and father prayed constantly. Dad said she used to sink into his arms while he prayed, as if to say, “Take me to Jesus.” I too went to God repeatedly during those weeks. I flailed my arms, buried my head in my hands, bargained my brains out. “God, you don’t know how much we need her.”

My sister, my father, my husband, and I hovered near her bedside when she died, after a mere six-week battle with the last development of her disease. We took turns saying our goodbyes while she flitted in and out of awareness. Finally, her hectic breathing ceased, replaced by the slow, mechanical wash of air over her vocal chords. Then, only quiet.

I felt her absence permeate the room, filling each corner and crevice. I had no attachment to the body—a forgotten garment spread out on her bed. Rather, I felt a kind of awe at Mom’s uncanny ability to slip out of her skin, the rest of us unawares. And the first question to rise up out of the darkness was “Where?” Where in the universe or beyond the universe has she escaped to?

During lent I made a prayer tree from a fallen branch. I planted this dead branch in a flower pot and strung it with prayers jotted out on tiny slips of paper, tying them to the branches with yarn, one for each troubled family member, each friend facing anxiety, illness, or despair. The tree stood there on my kitchen table for weeks after Easter had passed, crooked in its pot, as if bent under the pain of every human need scribbled over its branches.   

A part of me would like nothing better than to take the previous year and drain it down the sink. Life feels hollower than it used to. Since losing my mother, I’ve walked around a little closer to death, gripped by the certainty, that, this side of heaven, things will never be made right.  

With a deeper part of me, I see her death as connected to a thread that runs through the length of my days and bears being traced: this life is not self-subsisting, nor is it an end in itself. Human weakness—our utter dependence upon God for even a single heartbeat—is a truth spoken to us each day as our efforts at living in Christ’s footsteps are thwarted from a thousand angles.

Death is the last frustration of our efforts to save ourselves, finalizing our failure at living lives of purity. In the wake of death we release ourselves from the pride and rationalizations that keep us from recognizing our basic neediness as humans. We reel; we fall down.

As the dust settles, I consider what it means that Jesus carried our sin, not only in his death, but in his living life down here where there is a little death mixed up in everything. He bore our very neediness—the veins and tendons, sweat stains, tear trails, betrayal and abandonment, the loneliness that makes an aged man become a child through sobbing, the heart-wound that makes a young girl grow old in anger. Jesus bore it all in order that, in taking up our brokenness, he might redeem us from inside the tangled web of the human heart. It was not enough for Christ to look down on us with pity; instead, he followed us into our emptiness, took up our trouble, and “made our conflict with God his own” (T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 31).  

In the Gospel of John, Jesus demonstrates his involvement in our human plight as he journeys to the tomb of Lazarus. In witnessing the grief of Mary and those who are with her, Jesus is “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (11:33). He requests to be taken to the tomb. Then, he weeps (v. 34).  He weeps for those sorrowing nearby as well as for himself, who loved Lazarus deeply. He weeps for human weakness, our frailty, which he himself knows intimately. He weeps even knowing that in a few moments he will raise Lazarus from the dead. And he weeps knowing that in a few weeks time he will offer Himself as a sacrifice to redeem our very humanity.   

It is his commitment to our weakness that impels him to the cross, His ultimate demonstration of love for us. He determines not only to live our life, but to suffer our death. On the cross Christ bears our very estrangement from the Father. Helmut Thielicke writes, 

[Christ] implicates Himself so fully in our lostness that He must call out and cry in our place: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’… –as though to say: ‘I could bear everything, all the loneliness, all the agony, all the heartache, if only I could snatch one glance from Thee and feel the impress of Thy little finger. But I no longer see Thine eyes, and Thy hand is withdrawn from Me.’ (“The Final Dereliction,” in The Silence of God, 72-73.)   

Christ carries the full burden of our alienation from God. Yet, astonishingly, by making our abandonment his own, Christ reestablishes our relationship with him. By following us into our darkness, he pours his light upon our human hearts, cleansing them from within, inviting us into a renewed communion with the Triune God. As T. F. Torrance writes, in taking up our humanity, “God takes upon himself the very thing that separates us from him and turns it into the instrument of his love in binding us to him” (The Mediation of Christ, 43).

Death is not the final word our God speaks to us. Rather, death exposes our poverty as human creatures reliant upon Christ not only to sustain our lives but to redeem them through his own. My mother’s life down here was tinged by brokenness, and her death seemed premature. Yet, I recognize that she is now, as in her life and death, held forevermore in her Savior’s embrace. Death is a mark of our neediness, but, thanks be to Christ, it is not a wedge between ourselves and God, but the twine that binds our hearts to his.