The Difference Forty Days Makes

Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteems, approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within.
Amen.

Prayer of Welcome, Thomas Keating

Forty days ago I wrote a blog post in preparation for Lent. I wrote words that encouraged opening to what is rather than orchestrating contrived sacrifices, glibly saying things like, “Really, none of us know what we’ll find, which is kind of the most beautiful part of it all.” I started praying Thomas Keating’s Prayer of Welcome. But I had no idea what new reality I’d be asked to welcome. No idea what I would be asked to let go of during the coming days. I could not have known that it would feel like the opposite of beautiful. That it would make me fall to my knees and vomit. If I did, I would not—could not—have prayed that prayer. Even now, looking back, it seems that God was preparing me for what was to come.

Four days after I wrote the post and starting praying that prayer, my sister Angie, the joyful centerpiece of our sisterhood portrait above, was killed. Suddenly. Inexplicably. Tragically. In a season in which we are typically asked to seek out a sacrifice to bring us closer to God, my family was plunged unbidden into a new reality permeated by an unfathomable sacrifice not of our choosing.

Grief is unchartered territory for each of us. No matter how many have traversed that prickly terrain before us, it is always unknown and treacherous when we journey there ourselves. No one can give us their map, because their path is not ours.

Grief, like faith itself, is not a logistical proposition. Her death could not be rationalized and neither could my grief over her death. My mind played tricks on me, telling me that if I just wore the same clothes I was wearing before she died, it somehow wouldn’t have happened. So I donned them, day after day. And still she was gone. My grief convinced me that if I wrote obsessively in my journal, chronicling life from the moments preceding her death until the present, she would still be with us, carried magically on my words. So I scribbled nearly fifty pages. And still she was gone.

In those pages, I wrote about the absurdity of those early days saying, “Grief is allowed to be ridiculous. To throw rules out the window. To disregard the constructs of civility. Grief can be crazy. It can wail in public and fall to its knees. It can welcome friends in its bathrobe and sit with them in its unmade bed.”

I did all those things, and then I read. And read. And read. I read books the mirrored the raw emotions coursing through my veins. But when I was exhausted by lamenting her absence, I began searching for books that helped me understand where she was now. She could not have just vanished, for that was unthinkable. And it did not feel true to me. The spirit of Angie was still alive. I was sure of it.

Books on the afterlife became me new obsession. I needed to understand this new world in which my sister resides. If I couldn’t make sense of her death, I needed to make sense of this new life of hers. I could not get enough of stories of heaven from those who had experienced it via near death experiences and tales from those who were gifted with the ability to receive messages from those on the other side. It was like a curtain was being lifted and a new world was being revealed. Life here on earth became paradoxically more precious and less important. The afterlife had always seemed akin to fantastical Bible stories of life lived inside a giant fish or within the walls of an edenic gardens—analogous settings used to teach a lesson. But suddenly it seemed real because my sister was there. It had to be real because my sister was there.

I keep coming back to the significance of 40 days.

The traditional morning period of many world religions is 40 days.

Jesus wandered in the desert for 40 days.

The Lenten season is 40 days.

Eastern Orthodox Christians believe the soul ascends to heaven 40 days after death.

Jesus ascended to heaven 40 days after his crucifixion.

Now please understand that God typically doesn’t speak to me through numbers. They are, in fact, generally unintelligible to me. But I couldn’t ignore this message as it made its way to me again and again. When I sat down to begin writing this, I calculated how long it had been since I wrote that last post—the one that now seems Pollyanna-ish in its optimism. It had been exactly 40 days.

More calculating revealed that the traditional 40-day morning period for Angie, believed by some to also complete her soul’s ascension to heaven, fell on Thursday, April 2, which also happened to be Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday), the day Jesus’s soul ascended to heaven. Angie did everything in style, and it just seemed fitting that she’d ascend with Jesus. The 40-day mourning period following her death was encapsulated just within the bounds of Lent (which is a little longer than 40 days since Sundays are not included in the count). So this somber season of reflection took on new meaning to me as I mourned her absence. While the numbers were all neat and tidy, the experience was anything but and many times felt much like what Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness must have felt like, knowing God was close but feeling forsaken all the same.

So tonight, I will go to a Maundy Thursday service, and I will try to smile through my tears at the image of Angie ascending to heaven with Jesus. I will mark the official end of the mourning period, but I will not say goodbye to Angie. I will, instead, hang onto my love for her until we are together again, seeking ways here on earth spread the love she embodied so fully.