Sandra's Last Easter

It is Easter . . . when resurrections are not only possible but likely, expected even . . . and last night, on Holy Saturday . . . the day when Jesus descends into the bowels of the earth to seek out all who had gone before him before God does the divine work of resurrection this and every Easter Sunday . . . it was last night when beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, cousin, sister, friend, Sandra, died . . .

As I sat at her bedside yesterday, beholding all the indignities visited upon her poor body by medicine’s best efforts to keep her among the living, somehow what I beheld was not a sick perhaps unto death woman, but a phoenix . . . in the moments of just before . . .

Just before rebirth and rerising into its new creation, the phoenix descends into ash, out of which emerges a new beauty that holds all the ancient bird was before . . . in other words, resurrection . . .

My faith tells me that today Sandra rests easy with her Lord and that, while there is weeping here in the place we call below, for her, all is well and very well indeed.

That is an ash heap I can sit in . . . that, a place I can stand, proclaiming in confidence this Easter, as with all others, He is risen . . . and somehow, in ways I can barely imagine, let alone understand, so too is she, beloved beyond time, Sandra.