Death and Resurrection: Reflections on What Would Have Been My Mother’s 80th Birthday
Today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday. She died two months shy of it back in September. I haven’t really had time to deal with her death. She died just two days before the school year started and being the full-time headmaster for the first time, missing work just didn’t seem like an option. Grieving has been difficult. It’s come in waves. I wasn’t back in Illinois when she died and as there was no funeral or service, there was nothing to go back for. It would have been good to see my family, to mourn with them, but I couldn’t face it.
This isn’t the first time I’ve turned away from death. For those who don’t know, I was adopted. Which is how I’m 35 with octogenarian parents. My paternal grandparents adopted me when I was a little over a year old. My birth mother having given me up for adoption. Back in March of 2021, I found out my birth mother, whom I never met in person and only had a few, fraught exchanges with on social media, died. I was offered a chance then of video-chatting with her before she passed, but I chose not to. Death is a hard thing to face. And we haven’t made it any easier as a society when we hide it away like we do, when we act as though it is the ultimate unmentionable.
I’m trying to grieve, trying to, to mourn. But it’s hard. I’ve always painted myself as somewhat soulless. I can, and have, easily left friends and family, or been left by them, with very little emotion in the moment, and none in the aftermath. But death is different. It’s so much more final. There’s always the chance my college friends and I will see each other again. Eventually, I’ll go back home and see my family. But the dead? They are impossible to see. Aren’t they?
November for Catholics is, in many ways, the month of the dead. It begins on the first with All Saints Day, continues into the second with All Souls Day, and throughout the first week, prayers said for the faithful departed in graveyards grant indulgences to the souls already in Purgatory. As the natural world around us prepares for the death of winter, we are reminded that the dead are not simply dead. Yes, their bodies will decay, but their souls live on. And this is meant to bring us hope, hope that one day we will see our beloved dead again when Christ, the one who defeated death by dying, comes again and raises us all to life. Of course, I have to confess that perhaps not all will be raised to life with Christ in the new heavens and new earth, but like Hans Urs von Balthasar, I dare to hope that all will be saved.
Resurrection. It sounds like such a pipe dream sometimes. As I sit here listening to the ticking of a pocket watch handed down through my mom’s side of the family, it’s hard not to think that one day the ticking simply ends. And with it so does everything else. But then I look back outside. Even now, snow covers the ground, preparing to melt and soak into the soil, preparing it for a burst of new life in the spring. Things that seem to die, are really just preparing for more life, for truer life. I don’t think we could have guessed at resurrection, certainly not at the idea that our God himself would die and by doing so defeat death altogether, transforming it from our fiercest foe to a friend, a guide from one stage of life to the next.
My mom is dead. Both of my moms are dead. And in this life there is little I can do for them besides pray. But the day is coming, the day that will never end, the day when the clock will be reversed, re-started, and completed all at once. Death has been defeated, and one day we will taste of that victory, because the King who died for us did so that we might live again. And that is the hope I bring with me into my grief.
