The dream itself shook me awake. Not a dream; a message, a floating razor through my mind, subconscious tickertape:
Grandma is dying now.
I had been sleeping in my aunt’s apartment, across from the hospital where she worked, and also where my grandmother now lay in a hospital bed. Napping felt like an answer to the panic, shock, fatigue, anger, anguish, pain of continuing. A world without Grandma? How? Am I just supposed to keep going?
My family carried the question around in their bones and sought remedy. One relative wept. Another spoke of Grandma’s intubation and unconsciousness with monotone numbness. Another wore down the waiting room floor with her pacing.
There was no rationality for me. No neat answer to the question in my bones—none that I wanted to receive.
I had the privilege of living in the same house as my Grandma for 10 years. My senses were formed by her living witness. The sharp, tart aroma of cerasee tea or the dankness of boiling tripe. Her soft, wrinkle-free cheeks; their Palmolive scent. Her menagerie of jet-black, bone-straight wigs that hid springy plaited coils of silvery gray. The gel insert that I used to play hot-potato with before (and after) I knew it provided symmetry to a world expecting two high and lifted breasts from an elderly woman cancer survivor. The weathered hymnal from which she sang, every day, on her knees, to God.
She informed me, by living close and letting me observe, that strength is more nuanced than a dead-lift or an automatic weapon. Strength was leaving Jamaica with a 6th grade education and forging a new future in a strange land. Surviving sexual assault and the protection of the assaulter. Training and working in healthcare. Learning herself again after the divorce. She taught me that strength is beginning again and again and again and again.
I didn’t want the lesson. This kind of strength is conditioned by endings and endings were a weight I didn’t want to lift. Whispering love and care to Grandma in the hospital room, I wondered where the words landed. Was she able to receive them? Why didn’t I whisper these words more when I could look her in her alert and awake eyes? I felt the weight of helplessness and impending ending. I didn’t want to carry it. I slept.
I believe that the mercy of God looked like waking to be with my grandmother as she died. There were so many moments in her life that she was forced to face alone, but we surrounded her, were with her, when she died. Her last moments were chaotic and violent with botched interventions to get her to breathe. She was swollen and the emergency tracheotomy disfigured her. She deserved gentle transition but this world seldom offers gentleness to the deserving. I will never forget how her still, small body looked without her soul.
It is the trauma napping and the memory of my beloved Grandma’s tried and tired body that I take with me into this Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday; that informs my empathy with the grief-stricken band of Jesus followers.
Saturday is long and bleak and ripe with terror and trauma. Saturday is the cessation of the rise and fall of breathing chest and beating heart, the stench of blood and bowels, the unflinching witness of a body that could not withstand the violence visited upon it.
Saturday is waking up to the nightmare of reality and asking the question that we don’t want answered—are we just supposed to keep going?
On Saturday, we can’t. We don’t. We are stopped and stooped by the violent finality of death; death of loved ones, death of plans, death of hope. We are stunned into helplessness by a world so unjust that it kills the healers and prophets. We numb ourselves to forget the flogging, the cross, the nails, and our own denials.
We question God: why allow this? How can we trust You when You let this happen? What kind of kingdom is this, where the King of Kings is lynched?
We sit with the last words of Jesus that are spoken in the book of Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Even Jesus questioned the Father. Saturday is the day of honest, raw questions, followed by the silence of the grave. Sitting with a future bereft of hope, arms raised, or not, wailing and waiting for the answer in our bones to lift us from despair.