I found out my sister was dying of late stage four cancer a few days before Easter, just two years ago. Two years younger than me, my only sibling, and the only other living member of our family besides my children. She’d just moved into a new home she loved, gotten a new car that didn’t break down, had a new job she liked, a new church, and old friends living nearby. And then she went to see the doctor about one thing and he said, I’m sorry, you’re dying.

That was a grim Good Friday and a grim Easter.

A Good Friday Easter

“Jesus Christ is risen today” I sang with everyone else that Easter morning, happy as always to sing that long, drawn out “alleluia” that finishes every line in that hymn. I felt the joy and comfort of knowing that death does not have the last word. I knew that when my sister died, in a few weeks or a few months, I would be saying “See you later,” not “Goodbye.”

But still, as I wrote then, death does have the last word for the moment. When a loved one dies, she’s dead for the rest of your life. You can’t call her, you can’t hug her, you can’t tease her, you can’t listen to her stories or her rants, you can’t give her presents, you can’t watch her hanging out with your children who love her too. She’s decisively not here. The world has a hole in it.

We are made for fellowship with God in the next world, but He made us for fellowship with others in this world. We will feel the death of a loved one as a deep cut. Jesus wept at his friend Lazarus’s tomb, even when he knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead in a couple of minutes. A close friend’s death made him weep. How evil must death be to make the Son of God cry? There’s a reason St. Paul tells us to weep with those who weep, because this world is a world that gives us reason to cry.

But here’s the thing that complicates it all. Life goes on. It has to. You can’t keep weeping. The good things in life don’t stop being good things because you feel the pain of death more sharply than usual. You still have to do your duties. You have to mow the lawn and do your taxes and take your kids to the park. Watching your child run across the grass would be a pleasure even were all your friends dying. You would be unjust to your child to stand quietly mourning when he says, “Daddy, look at me!”

Living Between Death and Life

That’s the only way we can move through life in a created but fallen world, where loved ones die too soon but your children want you to watch them running. Sometimes you mourn, sometimes you cheer on your child. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes, and in both cases, blessed be the name of the Lord.

In other words, we live every day between the reality of death and the reality of Christ’s final victory over death. Sometimes we feel one and sometimes the other. Sometimes we feel the first and just can’t manage to feel the second. We still believe it, but we don’t feel it. Sometimes we’re blessed to feel the second in a way that erases, at least for a while, the first. Many people, for great stretches of their lives, feel the second much more than the first. 

Sometimes we say with comfort “Christ is risen,” but at other times we can only feel, “Christ is dead.” Sometimes we feel both. Preachers like the line, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” Sunday does come. Jesus does rise. He will come again. But in this life, we must also say, “It’s Sunday, but Friday’s coming.”

There’s a lot of pain in the world. Jesus doesn’t always make the pain go away. He suffers with us. He sends us others to suffer with us too. And He reminds us that He will wipe every tear from our eyes, and that someday there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

Not Only Easter

So much of our popular piety treats life as if it were always good and the Faith as if it were only Easter, and that’s just not the way we live. Our Lord Himself didn’t live like that. I remember coming back from church after that Easter service and sitting at the kitchen table, ten feet from my sister, who slumped in her chair sound asleep. She had dozens of tumors in her spine and the painkillers she had to take to keep from crying put her to sleep.

James Robison wrote about the loss of his daughter Robin: “Betty and I have experienced waves of both overwhelming peace and unbearable sorrow.” The pain was so great “that sometimes I feel like someone is pounding on my chest with a sledge hammer and then sitting on my heart.” Writing after her death, notice he said “feel,” not “felt.” This man who’d preached the love of God to millions knew how life could gut you.

Think of it this way: Every day is Holy Saturday. Even today, Easter Monday, a day we keep on celebrating Easter. I did not enjoy a joyous Easter Monday two years ago. We live on Holy Saturday. Sometimes we go back to Good Friday before we move on to Easter. That’s when we can only look to Jesus on the Cross and know He’s with us even in our hurt.

David Mills is a senior editor of The Stream. Part of “It Was a Grim Easter” appeared in On Easter Monday, We’re Back on Holy Saturday on Ethika Politika, of which he’s also a senior editor. For more on the death of his sister, see My Sister Died and the articles linked therein.