But we do not grieve as people without hope, for Christ the Lord has risen to die no more. He has taken us into the mystery and the grace of this life that springs up from death. … We must be people with hope to bring. There is no failure the Lord’s love cannot reverse, no humiliation he cannot exchange for blessing, no anger he cannot dissolve, no routine he cannot transfigure. All is swallowed up in victory. He has nothing but gifts to offer. It remains only for us to find how even the cross can be borne as a gift. (Holy Cross Constitutions #118)

By Joe Kolar ‘12MDiv

“Hey Joe, you got a minute?” 

I was in my last year of graduate school, serving as assistant rector in Duncan Hall, and the rector—my boss, Terry—was inviting me to step into his room. It was Thursday, November 3, 2011. 

“Sure, “ I said, a little confused. When we sat down, I saw that Terry had been crying. He said, “Joe, your mother took her own life today.”

In the nearly three years that have passed since I lost my mom to suicide, I’ve never forgotten the feeling of the moment these words hit my ears. It wasn’t one of complete agony, nor was it characterized by hysterical sadness. No, it was (and, if I’m honest, continues to be) a feeling like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. 

I suppose the best way to describe it is the way a building must feel (if buildings had feelings) when it suddenly and inexplicably loses power. There’s a shutting down, an emptiness that engulfs everything. It is more than the standard “sinking feeling” people reference. Things tend to sink “into” something. At this moment, there was nothing. It was utter nothingness, a complete and total feeling of being without; without thought, without reason, without explanation. Nothing. 

My mother, Michelle Jean Kolar, was born on October 6, 1960. She was the seventh of 10 children, the elder twin to her sister Monica. She was a gifted mother, particularly when my brother and I were younger. And yet, like all of us I figure, she struggled. Her burdens included depression, mental illness, alcoholism, feelings of inadequacy and failure, those types of things. They did not define her, but I’d say they hounded her. 

Eventually, the drumbeat of darkness caught her, the noise of life got too loud, and she succumbed to her sickness. She died November 3, 2011, less than one month after her 51st birthday.

***

I’ve found Grief to be a fickle friend, showing up on his time and usually without warning: in a room full of strangers at a party; walking down the greeting card aisle at Target; hearing another ill-timed and inappropriate joke from that guy who says a movie “makes me want to kill myself.” 

Each of these moments sends me spiraling outward into a vivid reality of painful memories: the sound of shocked voices when I called to share the news; the odd smell of the funeral home; the chill in the late fall air the day we laid her in the earth. All of these moments take me far away from wherever I happened to be into an isolated viewing room of the worst weeks of the my life.

Suicide is a cruel killer. Its cruelty is manifest in the way it robs survivors (we who are left behind) of their memories. The beautiful, complicated, thick life of a loved one is swallowed up into the steely circumstances of their death. Stories are silenced, memories muted, pictures hung less prominently. There is certain finitude to death by suicide. There is a truth to it as well. It is the truth of evil, of the unintelligible nature of our broken world. Death is alive in this life of ours, and its reach is far and wide. 

Still, despite the reality of our existence here and now, death remains an incomplete telling of the truth. There is—despite the very real experience of closing the casket of a loved one, of watching the earth be poured back into the grave out of which it was dug—more to be said, a fuller version of the truth to be told.

In the inexplicable, yet unmistakable, paschal pattern to Christian life, I’ve come to believe the truth that “We do not grieve as a people without hope, for Christ the Lord has risen to die no more.” This truth is not cheap. It does not take well to the nice-meaning, but ultimately immature theologizing of those who believe “God called her home,” or that “If God brings you to it, God will bring you through it.” This truth cost me (and no doubt all of us who have loved and lost) dearly. 

Despite its high price, this resurrection truth is also universal. I came to see this only after gaining the following insight through my sadness: Grief is at once both the most unique and the most universal experience a person can have. When we grieve a loved one, that grief, that pain, is so particular, so personal, that it is impossible for anyone else to understand what we feel. And yet, we who have grieved (if we have truly grieved) know exactly what another person experiencing the loss of a loved one is going through. 

There is a communion in grief, the depth of which is accessible only to those who have felt the emptiness of inexplicable pain or tragic death. But what is more, the communion of hope in which we share is also accessible to all, despite and because of each one’s particular circumstance. Just as the darkness of death seems to reach throughout the world, so too does the light of new life illuminate each corner of the globe.

The story of the empty tomb, that mysterious first glimpse of what we know as resurrection, does not erase the pain of death nor does it gloss over the confusion of tragedy. Rather, it is a mysterious, hope-causing event, in which those who view that rolled away stone can only walk away in wonder and fear, thinking to themselves “Perhaps it didn’t end here. Perhaps there is more to this story.” The story of which we speak begins, time and again, with the cross. Only through the cross are we able to fully experience the mysterious hope of the empty tomb. Indeed, “there will be dying to do on our way to the Father.”

The confounding glory and power of the cross is that God shares in our communion in grief. God participates in our sadness, as both the one who suffers and the one who grieves. The cross is at once the sign of utter emptiness and total communion. Our God, the one who walked with us on the tragic and joyful journey of human life, knows the fear, loss, and tragedy of death, and does not endeavor to take it away. 

The cross is the symbol of God’s silence and presence, the sign of a God who does not plaster over the pain of life in order to make everything all right. Gazing on the cross, we see a deeper, more present God who says to us in our suffering, “I, too, hurt. I, too, weep. I, too, grieve. You do not go it alone.”

God turns this cross, this very real instrument of pain and earthly symbol of emptiness, into a sign of hope and the way to life. God’s answer to my pain, your pain, the world’s pain is not to take it away, but instead to experience it alongside us, to acknowledge our personal experience of it, to feel it for God’s own self, and say in response, “No! This shall not be the end!” 

The emptiness of the tomb replaces and engulfs the emptiness felt at the foot of the cross. The resurrection serves as God’s enduring response to death, to my mother’s darkness, to Jesus’ crucifixion, to each and every one’s suffering. “There is no failure the Lord’s love cannot reverse, no humiliation he cannot exchange for blessing, no anger he cannot dissolve, no routine he cannot transfigure.

***

Having just marked what would have been my mother’s 54th birthday, I still grieve her absence. The pain remains, my tears still fall, and her memory is ever on my mind. 

What sustains me through the darkness is the light of the cross and the emptiness of the tomb, both made present in my life through people with hope to bring. Like Our Lady of Sorrows, I have been graced with a communion of presence at the foot of my cross. Classmates, loved ones, friends, professors, even strangers have helped me to bear this cross as a gift, and even more so to see it as such. 

Yes, I still grieve, and I suspect I always will. But, thanks to the grace of God made manifest through God’s own people, I do not grieve without hope. Death’s truth is incomplete. There is indeed more to the story. “All is swallowed up in victory.”