Why Do They Call it Good?

Today is what they call Good Friday. I know all the pious answers to why we call it Good, but it still doesn't resonate with me. To me, Good Friday is the inevitable Bad Day you have to go through to get to Resurrection. This year I didn't want this day to come. Normally, it's my favorite time of the Church Year, the most powerful. I pour everything into it, dive right in as deep as I can go, only to come up splashing through the surface of Easter.
Then I collapse and take a nap.

But this year, it's harder to face this so-called Good Friday. I hate death. I'm not going to kid you. I hate death. I've seen it many times, in my profession. I've been there to pray with the dying, many of whom I didn't know before that moment. I was called in to "pray them out", as if my prayers would somehow get the door open for them. I don't like that responsibility, I think anyone's prayers would work, but I understand that in those moments people need to feel like someone is ok with what's going on and level-headed.

This year changed everything. I saw too many dear friends die. Some were old and full of years, and yet it was no less heartbreaking to see them go. Some I knew better than others. I also had to preside over the funeral of one who took his own life, and in the midst of all the darkness of this past year, that was almost too much to take. But we got through it.

A year ago my friend Karen was doing whatever she normally did in March. Maybe she'd gone for a walk with her husband and listened to the Sandhill Cranes that stop by to say hello every year in the skies surrounding her home. She loved this time of year, and reveled in it. Life was good. She'd putz around the house, doing a sewing project in her full-to-bursting sewing room, or play Spider Solitaire on her computer and keep her eye on her husband who was putzing around in the yard outside her window. Occasionally she'd knock on the window and signal him to do this or that. She hated to lose at Spider Solitaire, she'd keep at it until she got it. There was no reason not to win.

Maybe she was planning a weekend with her daughter, maybe she and her husband were in the van on their way out west to be with her daughter, whose husband was in Iraq. The grandkids would wear her out, but you could tell it was in a way that she relished. She adored them. But she was ready for a rest when it was time to head East again. If she didn't head out west that weekend, they'd work around the house. They'd go to church on Sunday in their jeans and Birkenstocks, mabye they were ushers that Sunday. She always seemed to enjoy herself wherever she was, and it was contagious. People tended to enjoy themselves when Karen was in the room.

So it doesn't make sense, that a year ago, she was her usual, joyful, carefree self. No storms on the horizon, nothing clouding her field of vision. It was in July. I'd had a tough first six months of the year with funerals, even had one on my birthday, and I was desperate to get out of town. We only went to Ft. Kearney, not that far, but it was far enough away to pitch our tent and listen to the stillness. I remember I'd walked the river walk, on the wooden bridge, and had a peaceful time alone. I needed peace. I needed to refuel. I only had a couple of days, and Larry still went to work, but I took what I could, thinking that surely it would get better. Things would calm down.

That night, as Larry was cooking supper on the grill, and we'd built a campfire, a person from church stopped by. She'd been to the sewing group that morning, and told me the news that would begin a very long, heartbreaking journey. Karen had a mass on her pancreas. Karen? Did I hear her right? On her pancreas. I knew that "mass" and "pancreas" in the same sentence wasn't good at all, but Karen? Surely there was some way to alter what I heard. Somehow, certainly, I'd go home and find out it was a nasty, cruel rumor.

It wasn't.

This time, it was personal.

The cancer, we later learned, was Stage 4. Not good. Days and weeks unfolded. There were constant updates, emails, hugs at church. Karen acting as if she wasn't sick at all, which helped us believe that maybe it wasn't true after all. About August, as I began to realize that I was on a journey with her that could not end happily, I flat out told God, "I can't watch her get sick and die." I didn't think I had it in me. Even if I hadn't had a deadly first six months of funerals, even if I hadn't been at the bedside of too many people, praying them home. I couldn't do it.

Those last few months of her life was like one long, "Good" Friday. But it certainly didn't FEEL good. All of October, I went to the hospital every day, even on my day off. Sometimes I went twice a day. I was scared. It was one thing to have that "professional distance," but now I had to face death head on, stare it clear in the face as it came to claim my dear friend. I was really angry. Same old question, same old lack of answers. Why do good people die early and some real jerks live forever? God took a lot of heat during those weeks. Not that I blamed God, but who else did I have to yell at? I knew that God didn't do this. Cancer happens. Excrement Happens.

Some days Karen was very alert and energetic, ready for a long visit. Other days, she told me when I got there that we'd keep it short that day, as she was so tired. But she never turned me away. Some days she was snowed by morphine, so much so that she made no sense whatsoever, and those days I just sat and held her hand. We talked about dying, which did not feel comfortable to me at first. That somehow made it real, inevitable. I had a hard time facing the inevitability of her death. Every day I went to see her, we prayed. We hugged (which isn't easy when one of the persons hugging is laying down!) I'd leave her room, turn the corner of 4 South in the hospital, and then I'd cry. I'd cry all the way to the parking lot. Sometimes I put on my sunglasses to hide my face. Other times I didn't care. We were in a hospital-- tears were not unusual in such a place. I'd sit in my car until the tears subsided and I was spent. I'd wipe my face, blow my nose, and go home. Usually I had to take a nap before I could do anything else. Loving Karen through those days took every ounce of energy I had. Maybe because I was holding on so tight, even as I felt her slipping away. But I couldn't help it. It wasn't fair.

She went home to hospice. I was there when the hospice team came in to explain everything, and Karen turned to me, pointed me in the face and said, "Now, don't you be sad!!" Yet her own expression betrayed her.

Her bed was by the window, where she could look out on the lake, with all the wildlife visible to her. We talked a lot, most days, about our lives, about dying, what she would miss. Her sunroom became holy ground for me. Her husband always made me a cup of tea, and I pulled up a chair beside her bed as I drank it. I held her hand with my other hand until both got sweaty and we had to wipe them off on the bedsheets. We laughed sometimes, because that's what Karen liked to do. But God was there. Giving me the strength to face this, giving me the strength to pray for her-- I could sense the presence of Christ surrounding us. I think I was more scared than she was, but somehow she gained some strength from me.

She wasn't eating much in those last weeks. She tried a bite of jello here and there, but nothing tasted good. I fed her a popcicle one day. Some days I fed her ice chips. There's nothing much more intimate than feeding someone, even if it's only ice. The hospice nurses told her husband where to get a certain kind of ice pellets, and whenever I go to Taco John's, I think of Karen as I get my drink and get ice pellets in my cup, similar to the ones I fed her by hand. I adjusted the blankets around her feet-- she hated to have her feet covered; she said she was born with "hot feet." That last week, she threw up a lot; ugly green stuff. She was miserable. She'd double up in pain and all I could do was stroke her leg, her head and wince with helplessness. Sometimes she held onto my hand so tight I thought she was going to burst a blood vessel. I held her barf bin, and wiped her mouth after each episode, trying not to gag myself. She looked up at me once between retches and said, "Now you know what your husband does every day." Even in the midst of that, she was able to find humor.

I got the call one Tuesday afternoon. A hospice nurse called me and said it was time to come. She asked if I was ok being alone with Karen and her husband, and for some reason, I felt sure that I would be, that I had to be, that that's how it was supposed to be. I sat by her bed, holding her hand as she struggled for breath, groaing occasionally. I hand-fed her ice pellets, putting them in the corner of her mouth. I cried freely, telling her it was ok. I sang to her. I told her to save me a place near her. I thanked her for her life. It was like I was a different person, somehow all fear was suspended, all thought of fear was suspended in those moments. At some point, her breathing changed. She breathed more slowly, like a series of sighs, and I knew we were close to the end. Her husband sat beside her, and I sat at her feet, stroking her leg. We cried, I prayed, as her breathing continued to slow. Within minutes, she let out one long, deep sigh, and stopped breathing. It was like time was suspended, and everything, the whole world, held it's breath. Peace. "Is she gone?" her husband said, feeling for her heartbeat. "I think so," I said, feeling for her pulse. It was so quiet, so peaceful, so.... ok. I felt embraced and held by something unseen. We were all ok. Our hearts broke, but we were ok.

It's been almost 4 months since that night. Today is Good Friday. The day never felt so personal. I'm a little reluctant to reach into the darkness tonight and face the horror, the darkness of Jesus' violent death, as my heart is burned with images of my dear friend as she lay dying; her body small in the bed, lessened by disease, worn out with pain and that relentless demon Cancer. I will think of her tonight, and I will ache, I know. I will ache again at the darkness of death, the seeming cruelty of it when it comes way too soon and with suffering. But I will reach into that darkness, knowing that I must, if I am to wake on Easter morning with the hope and the power and the music and the chance to begin again. And I will think of her then, too. I will be intoxicated by the aroma of Easter lilies, jolted by the power of the church organ bursting out the hymn, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," and I will remember that Karen, too, is risen. I will trust, I will believe. And I will reach into the emptiness of that ancient tomb and rejoice. I will try to remember that Death has no victory, though I do still feel its sting....