My dandelion wish
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| Puffed. Franco Lautieri/Flickr/CC BY 2.0 |
The last time I saw my friend Kathleen under normal circumstances was at Easter. We spent a sun-filled afternoon in my backyard, kids and friends and family surrounding us, awash in the hope of resurrection that this most holy Christian day promises. Just the week before, Kathleen had received sobering results from her most recent cancer scan. Her prognosis—terminal from day 1—seemed shorter yet. But despite that, or maybe because of it, we laughed and ate cupcakes and took group pictures, overjoyed to be present to the day together, our joy backlit by our knowledge of its impermanence.
One month later, on an equally sunlit day, I was again in my backyard, this time having an evening picnic with my husband and children. Within the elapsed weeks, Kathleen’s health had taken a sudden and rapid turn for the worse. Her death was imminent, and I was in the throes of anticipatory grief. The hot, sunny weather assaulted and offended me. How dare spring be beautiful when someone I love—a scholar, a sailor, a mother, a wife, a friend—was about to die? My eyes welled with tears that clouded the slanting light across our lawn. It was then my older son ran up to me with a dandelion puff clutched in his fist.
“Mommy!” he exhaled in a stage whisper. “Blow on the dandelion and make a wish, but don’t tell anyone.” He dropped the dandelion in my lap and ran away again. I held up the sticky stem. Twirled it slowly. Took in the geodesic dome formed by the delicate pappi. Observed the dainty shadow they made across my leg.
I didn’t need to think about my wish. In that moment, I cried from the bottom of my heart to saint-to-be Sr. Thea Bowman, a Black Catholic sister whose abundant joy and charisma deepened the U.S. Catholic Church’s understanding of Black Catholic spirituality and whose earthly ministry was also cut short by an aggressive cancer.
Sr. Thea, heal Kathleen! Keep her here! Get yourself canonized in the process! (I am not above appealing to intercessors’ self-interests.) It took three quivering breaths for me to shake all the dandelion seeds loose and release them to the wind, grass, and all mysterious forces beyond my understanding or control.
My son came running back to me. “Mommy, tell me your wish!”
“Honey, isn’t that against the rules?”
He shook his head. “Nooo, Mommy. Tell me your wish when it comes true.”
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Sr. Thea did not intercede, or maybe God did not choose to act, and two weeks later my friend died in a hospice center with her spouse and siblings at her side.
At Kathleen’s beautiful, heartbreaking funeral, the gospel reading was about the raising of Lazarus, a story I’ve heard many times before but attended to with fresh ears given the somber circumstances. What I had never noticed before was that Jesus explicitly decides not to travel in time to save his friend from dying, and that both Lazarus’ sisters call him on it with the exact same language: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. How many times in the face of our own losses and griefs have we wailed a variation of this sentiment? Lord, if you had been here, the person I love would not have suffered. Hearing this cry from Martha and Mary put a match to the kindling of my anger, disappointment, and sense of cosmic injustice. Lord, if you had been here, I wept to myself in the pew, my friend would not have died.
In essence, wasn’t this the heart of my dandelion wish—to invite God into an impossible situation, to get the big guns on my side to forestall the worst possible scenario? I was appealing to the heavens in a desperate bid to be heard and pitching myself headlong at a conviction in God’s eternal presence that I don’t always hold. I knew deep down at the time of my wish that nature was moving against us. I knew nothing short of a bona fide, get-the-Vatican-out-here-to-verify miracle would change Kathleen’s physical outcome. And still the most childlike part of me yearned to connect, to try, for if faith can spring from a mustard seed, I reasoned, why not from that of a dandelion?
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These days, in the quiet moments of dark before I fall asleep, I often wonder: Did I doom my friend through my doubt? Did God feel the reluctant undercurrent in my backyard prayer and back away from granting it? Did the Universe receive my wild stab as the roulette spin it was and deem it too little, too late?
I can’t totally accept that the merciful and loving God I want to follow would behave this way, but when sorrow pools around my feet, fear rides in on the tide. Here the story of Lazarus offers me some consolation, in that Jesus—the son of God who already knows he’s going to raise his friend from the dead—still weeps for him on the way to the tomb. Here my tender heart recognizes Jesus’ all-too-human grief, the washing over of memories, conversations, and inside jokes he shared with someone he loved who will never be present to him in quite the same way again.
What wordless prayer was Jesus praying with his tears? Perhaps he was asking for the strength to do the impossible, to face his own fear of natural death and decay. Perhaps he was hoping his friend would forgive him for letting him die once and then committing him to die twice. Or perhaps his tears were simply catharsis, his release after a long journey and several sleepless nights and the knowledge of his own approaching death … a simple, understandable, profound moment of humanity that any one of us who loves another will one day experience, too.
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As happens every time I encounter and contemplate mortality, I teeter on the brink of a crisis of faith. Sometimes I back away slowly, either from comfort or fear or simply not having the energy to engage with the biggest mystery of human existence, and sometimes I tip forward into a prolonged period of hopeless questioning.
This time, however, I remain on the edge to gaze into the abyss, prevented from tipping over by the source herself. During our lively Easter visit, Kathleen and I had stolen a quiet moment for a kitchen conversation. I asked her how she was doing since her mother’s death in January. She thought for a moment, then said, “It’s taking some getting used to, for sure. I used to call her regularly, and even when she couldn’t really respond anymore, I still appreciated being present with her. But in a way, it’s kind of nice to able to talk to her whenever I want to now, without the constraints of earthly time.”
Such was Kathleen’s spirituality, faith in the deepest sense of the word: unshakeable, rooted, sincere in her conviction that she was and would be in the arms of God. Her attitude always impressed—no, let’s be honest—intimidated me. Even at the worst moments in her illness, she never expressed (to me, anyway) that she felt angry at God or resentful of the way nature didn’t break in her favor. Instead she referred to the “joy of cancer,” by which she meant the opportunity to live fully present to her life and her Creator, to feel that God was “refining” her though the experience.
While I have many thoughts of how we choose to make meaning from suffering, I will save that reflection for another day and say this instead: My friend nurtured and cultivated her relationship with the Divine Mystery and in turn let it nurture and cultivate her. Her life was truly one of faith and works, where she chose to live in community with and in service to many others. Regardless of what comes after the brief puff of our natural lives, she by every measure lived a rich and holy one while here, and that inspires me—right now, for now, literally—to keep my faith to honor hers.
As you already know, my dandelion wish did not come true. I tell it to you anyway because I am too uncertain about what “true” even means in circumstances like these, when wishes are tied up in heaven and earth and life and death, and I prefer to err on the side of hope—hope that God heard me, hope that God answered me, hope that my friend now knows what I prayed for her then and always.
Prayer #400: Life/Cycle (For Kathleen)
You are the seed
and the wind that carries it.
You are the ground
and the rain that waters it.
You are the root
and the bloom that resurrects it.
Amen.