DECATUR, Ga. — Last year, on Easter Monday, my friend Genia — a 47-year-old woman in my congregation, a mother of two kids the same ages as my own — died of breast cancer. Ten years ago, she was the first person I met after my husband and I arrived here from New York City to co-pastor the church her extended family had helped start generations before.
We had moved to Decatur because our infant daughter had a life-threatening condition, and her care was too much to manage in a tiny apartment on a minister’s salary. I went to see Genia while she was recovering from a surgery. It had taken place in the hospital across the street from the children’s hospital where my daughter was transferred by medical jet. For both Genia and me, our daughters’ births had ushered in the possibility of death too quickly. Genia found the lump while breast feeding. My water broke at 18 weeks, and my daughter weighed two pounds when she was born 10 weeks later.
In 15 years of ministry, I have sprinkled the heads of dozens of babies and washed hundreds of feet. But there isn’t a ritual in the prayer books for what my parishioner-turned-friend and I were experiencing: the blessing of motherhood appearing with the angel of death. So we made up our own, needing to honor the fact that our living and our dying are intertwined. Mostly, we sat together in silence, as meditation offered a peace when the words of our faith tradition were not enough.
We continued this practice off and on for 10 years, when she got better and when my daughter got worse, when the cancer returned in Genia’s spine and then her liver, when a reconstructive surgery gave my daughter the ability to breathe on her own and gave my previously nonverbal girl a voice and the chance to enter kindergarten with her peers. And, finally, when the cancer spread to my friend’s brain and she struggled to say anything at all.
Last year, on Palm Sunday, after a few moments of prayer and silence together, I stroked a blend of essential oils across Genia’s forehead and rested my hand on her shoulder, anointing her in the same way the woman in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew honored Jesus’ body with expensive perfume. I foresaw the void I’d feel when her corpse was carried out from that room and out of my reach forever. This is not how last rites go in the prayer book, but Genia and I had become adept at creating meaningful rituals for ourselves. Slowly, laboriously, she reached up to rest her own hand over mine and said, “Thank you.” A fitting goodbye for a woman who maintained her gratitude over a decade of trials and who would be remembered by everyone from her father to the clerk at the Y.M.C.A. as a person capable of being entirely present to others.
Back when we planned her funeral, she asked me not to give a homily but instead to lead the crowd in silent meditation — the kind that had sustained her throughout her illness, the kind we had fumbled our way through together. I immediately thought of the pitfalls — the trouble sitting still, the potential for loud sobbing, the ill-timed cough or high-pitched question in a funeral with a significant number of children. But where I saw the potential failure of ritual, she saw the unexpected beauty. All those she loved sitting in one room, the sanctuary that had held her family for years, breathing together, searching for meaning beyond words, grasping for the thread that connects the living and the dead, clearing the mind to make room for the peace that surpasses understanding.
She was right. In the moment, 850 of us managed to be quiet long enough to surrender to the paradoxical dynamic of letting go and searching for something greater. It was only 10 minutes, one for each year of her cancer, honoring her ability to stay present to life while anticipating her oncoming death. The silence ended with an Emmylou Harris song that Genia had picked out. “When I die, don’t cry for me, I’ll be gone and I’ll be free.”
Despite the song’s command, it seemed that all 850 mourners wept at that moment. But not me. Even as I commended her spirit to God, my voice only broke once. She was gone, my companion in motherhood and centering prayer, her body cremated, her place in the front pew now empty every Sunday.
What I needed was my own mourning ritual, one that unleashed me from the burden of presiding over other people’s grief, one that let me access my own.
As I walked home that night, I thought about the other side of Genia: the risk taker, the party lover, the one who could find joy as easily as she could rush to comfort pain or sorrow. I remembered the woman who was known for her cheery call of “Love ya!” whenever she parted from family or friends. I took a shortcut past our neighborhood pool. The reflection of the moon floated on its surface. I remembered our jaunts to the beach, to the mountains — the ones she begged me to take a weekend off from church for, the ones I too often declined.
I started to cry. My face wet but my body still dry, I unlocked the pool gate with my key, and still wearing my clergy collar, its stiff white plastic arc circling my neck like the crescent of the moon cradling the rest of its shadowed body, I jumped in, calling “Love ya!” to my friend before the water took me in.
This Holy Week of the pandemic year, a year when memorials for the dead are indefinitely postponed and in-person Easter rituals are canceled across Christendom, we will mourn the pomp and circumstance of the sacred rites, but we can still linger in the intimacy of our bodies. We can savor the dampness of our tears and the coolness of the water when we wash them away. We can care for those with whom we are quarantined, if not in the bathing of little feet and anointing of brows, then by taking the time to practice silence together, to offer a long, loving look into the eyes of someone seated a safe distance away or on the other side of a teleconferencing camera. There’s so much glory to be experienced even on this side of the resurrection.
Beth Waltemath is a writer and minister, who serves as co-pastor of North Decatur Presbyterian Church.
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