Happy Birthday

Hypnagogic.

A big fancy word I didn’t even know that I knew. And this decades old SAT trivia echoed in my head with each mundane task.

This can’t be real.  Stir stir stir. This is absurd.  Pour the milk. This feels crazy. Scrub the dish. How can I be making batch after batch of sprinkle-y pink cupcakes for my little girl’s birthday—when she is dead.

I know. Nobody wants me to say “dead”. It feels obscene. It’s too stark, too ugly, too slapping-you-in-the face-shocking to use words like that. But that’s how the thoughts feel inside my head. She IS dead. And she will not be eating these pink cupcakes. And it IS obscene. Covering it all up with polite words that don’t stick in your throat doesn’t communicate how every breath I am taking sticks in my throat.

Since the accident there have been dark days, and numb days, and days drowning in tears—but today was simply a surreal day. Why do I feel compelled to prepare for a birthday party that won’t include the guest of honor? My body moving through the kitchen making festive looking treats that will be eaten through tears. The WEIRDNESS of it all is what overwhelms me.

Then it was Bible class/birthday party time. I packed up all my sad cupcakes and wrapped all my armors around myself and sat in front of a pile of forty kids or so and told them that Jesus understands our griefs. That He weeps with us. That He has a plan that can reunite us all one day. I preached the message to this sea of liquid innocent eyes and wanted to believe it the way they believed me. I cheered them on to scream the words to the verse over and over hoping I might hear it:

 “God loves….anyone who believes...eternal life”.

I don’t know where my faith stands. I don’t know if I am brave enough to think deeply about holy things. Mostly I am just trying to keep going. But I think I learned something about the ritual of communion last night. As I passed around the cupcakes to kids coloring pictures of those they have lost in their lives, every child took it solemnly.  I offered the tray to a friend and she paused just a beat. Mouth pursed to say “No thanks.” And then her hand moved so deliberately with just a tiny half nod. She picked up that cute little cupcake like it weighed a thousand pounds. Because it did. Because it was more than a sweet piece of bread. It was done in memory of her.

In that one second I saw the horrible beauty of the communion meal.

                                “as you eat this…proclaim the Lord’s death…”

It should stick in our throats like pink cupcakes. This is proclaiming the ugliness of death. This is swallowing the shocking-face-slapping truth. This is shouting defiantly that we know what death is. And more than that—that even knowing the true obscenity of death we will take it into ourselves because we hold some spark of hope that HE has overcome it. That maybe we can too.