He Rose Again

The City of Jerusalem in our Atrium

“But why?  Why did he have to die?”  The question of my, then seven year-old, goddaughter still rings in my ears.  It was near Easter time, a year ago, and we had been meditating in the Atrium on the Paschal Narratives:  of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper with his disciples, his arrest, Passion, and Crucifixion.  Her question, asked with all of the innocence of childhood and also the necessity of one who really needs to know, brought me up short. A few months later, attending a catechist training in California, I brought up this moment before the group.  “What do you say?” I asked,  “What can you possibly say to this question?”  After listening to several ideas, our trainer reflected, “the best way I’ve heard it explained is that Jesus had to die because he was born.  He became human.  That is the mystery and the scandal of the Incarnation. God became human and therefore by the very nature of his birth, his death too, was foretold.” 

And it’s true.  We are all born.  And we will all die.  Normally, this reality doesn’t cause us to stop going about the minutiae of life.  In the face of mortality we continue to take the dog for walks, read bedtime stories, and do the dishes.  But sometimes, the reality is too much.

On the night of Easter Monday I couldn’t sleep.  I tossed and turned in bed for a while and then decided I could at least get up and do something useful—surf Facebook.  Throughout the newsfeed, friends from my college years had posted pictures, hundreds of them, with a man named Mike Harry. His name wasn’t familiar.  So I followed the different links, looked up the different pictures, and discovered Mike Harry.  There were pictures of him on college SEARCH retreats, and pictures at Jack & Dan’s, the neighborhood Gonzaga bar.  He seemed like a fun guy.  Usually with a group of friends, his arm thrown around shoulders, smiling, making goofy faces.  I finally looked up his own Facebook page and learned more of his story.  After Gonzaga, he moved back home to Wyoming, fell in love, got married, and was accepted into nursing school.  Amongst the engagement pictures and wedding photos, the Hawaiian vacation shots and pictures with his dog, were ones of him smiling with his head shaved, his athletic form thinning.  The last picture I found was dated a week ago, Mike and a college friend were watching a Gonzaga basketball game together, but Mike was in a hospital bed, hooked up to oxygen, his wasted body looking like it was almost fading away—but with a smile still bigger than life. 

Apparently, Mike had brain cancer and he died on Easter Monday.  One post from his Mom on Good Friday read, “I’m sitting here watching my little boy sleep and thinking of how proud I am to be his mom.”  As the hours stretched from midnight to 3am I read about this stranger, who had lived so full and beautiful a life, and had touched so many, thinking, just like my goddaughter, “But why?  Why did he have to die?”    

The next day I learned of another death, also from cancer, also way too young.  Renee Walker did her student teaching many years ago with my mother and then took a job as a kindergarten/first grade teacher at Gastineau school where she taught up through last May.  When she found out our family was in the Gastineau school district she invited me to observe in her classroom so I could know more about the community before the girls began school. When the girls were kindergarteners, she came over to our house and visited with them before they made the big jump from their small Montessori pre-school/kindergarten to “the BIG school.”  Even though they didn’t end up being in her classroom for 1^st grade, the girls loved seeing her in the hallways and around school, always with a warm word and smile for them.    

The morning after she died, the second graders had a special counseling session to process the news of her passing. Apparently it was a pretty tough time.  A & J told me how they sat around and shared stories about Mrs. Walker and then near the end one of the kids remembered how last year, in Mrs. Walker’s 1^st grade class, they had had a guinea pig named “Sunshine,” and when Sunshine died they buried him together and sang “You are my Sunshine” to the guinea pig.  So, together in the counselor’s classroom they decided to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to Mrs. Walker.  “That’s when we lost it” Ani told me matter-of-factly.

The next day, I went to our morning Atrium session to be a catechist with the three to six year olds.  I felt heavy, not like one filled with Easter joy, but weighted down with the awareness that many people--spouses, children, friends, colleagues of these two remarkable individuals--were hurting and grieving and  asking, “But why?”  At one point I invited one of the children over to our diorama of the City of Jerusalem.  We use this raised map to tell the Passion Narrative and to “walk” through the streets of Jerusalem from the Upper Room, to the Mount of Olives, to Caiaphas’ House, and Herod’s Palace.  When we came to the Tower of Antonia, where Pontius Pilate lived, and I told the child, “it was here, that it was decided that Jesus would die,” he leaned in close to me and lisped in my ear with certainty and joy, “but don’t worry ‘Taty’, he ‘wose’ again.” 

When death and sorrow touch our lives, we continue on living in hope and faith that this is not the end of the story.  As my Gonzaga SEARCH retreat friends often say, “The best is yet to come.”  Remembering Mrs. Walker, Jessica told me, “She gave us hope and courage as we started our new school.”  What beautiful gifts we can carry with us from lives fully lived, hope and courage in this adventure and in the one to come.