More Things That Got Me Kicked Out of Bible Study: Holy Saturday

Some silences are not empty. They’re pressurized. Hospitals know it. So does God, I think. Holy Saturday is the day when nothing moves and everything holds its breath.

Some of us know that silence far too well. We have sat beside it, soaked in it, tried to find anchor in its depths. We have watched vinyl pads be fastened to hospital bed rails, not because anyone says the word seizures, but because everyone knows they’re coming. We’ve seen space cleared around our child’s hospital bed, quietly making room for the crash cart. We’ve seen five words scrawled on a whiteboard, like some terrible liturgical refrain:
Parents aware of fatality risk.

That’s how something unspeakable gets recorded as the odds shift from may survive to unknown. It’s when we’re told to talk to her while she still remembers who we are, before the poison takes her cognition from her too. It’s when we are told there will be no time for her siblings to say goodbye. Not may not. Will not.

No one knows how to hold those words. There is no class for this. No scripture to steady your hands while you brush the unruly curls from her forehead, your breath catching at how quickly such a familiar act has become so grave. There is no prayer strong enough to carry you when the young resident assigned to your child gently suggests you begin to say goodbye, his voice breaking as he does.

There is no doctrine for what to do when you cannot turn off your motherhood. Gently squeezing his hand, letting him know you see his sorrow too. That you wish you could spare him this moment, even if it is part of his calling.

They chart the presence of parents at bedside. They chart organ failure. They chart the ammonia rising, still corroding this perfect girl from the inside out despite the charcoal in her veins. They chart transplant status. They chart that you know, at this very moment, she is dying.

But no one charts the ache in your voice when you whisper to her that this is not hers to carry alone. No one charts that the flutter of her eyelashes, once the signal of sleep, now signals the onset of seizures. It’s not charted that you already know what it feels like to bury a daughter.

That’s what Holy Saturday is. Not loud. Not resolved. Just the space between almost and aftermath, where nothing can be undone and nothing has fully broken. It is where grief sits upright and waits.

And it’s where we stay. Not because we are certain of resurrection, but because we know this is the part that does not get sung about. And someone has to stay with it.

So we do.
Together.