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still easter

6 Comments

It is still Easter. Good God.

It is a dragging long Easter this year. Two more weeks still to go before we can breathe back into ordinary time. How long do I have to try to rejoice?

Our family has done officially zero of our usual Easter season practices. The beloved Tomie de Paola sticker calendar is shoved in a corner, all stickers unstuck. Repeat rounds of eggs went un-dyed. I threw away the candy and the kids didn’t notice.

Part of me believes that Easter could bring us extra hope this year. We got to glimpse pure light in the midst of darkness, resurrection in the middle of sorrow. We will never get closer.

But truth be told, my heart does not want to rejoice. It wants to climb back into the tomb and push back through Good Friday and come out on the other side of still-Lent.

Because back there we did not have dead children. And our future still looked familiar.

. . .

On Easter Sunday morning, Maggie and Abby had been gone for exactly one month. Franco and I stood up in front of our parish and told their story again. I looked up at the faces listening to us speak, and I thought this is wonderful and this is horrible, all at once.

The same dichotomy yanks at my heart every day. We get death certificates in the mailbox, and we get cards from friends who know we still need to hear their names. We help raise thousands of dollars for other mothers and babies in their honor, and we can’t stand to see other people’s babies.

He digs a new garden in their memory and I tell him it’s going to be beautiful and we agree that we still hate that we are doing it. I start writing their story and he tells me it will change people’s lives and we agree that we still wish there were no great story to share.


We don’t have to reconcile any of the tensions we are feeling. This is not the time for happy endings or pretty bows. But the weight of so many at once is too much. I still wake up every morning and have to blink my way back into the world where this is real.

I don’t know how we go on. I just know that we go on.

. . .

Easter changed everything. I already believed that. But now Easter is changing again. 

In this space of grief, we are learning truths about the tomb that I never wanted to learn. 

That all the disciples’ joy at the resurrection came from loss. The teacher and friend they loved would never be the same. They had to let go of the Jesus they knew to embrace the Christ who was.

We had to let go of what we loved. Now we are picking up what matters most. Now we are trying to figure out how to rebuild new life around it.

If it were not for the truth that everything we have lived is exactly what resurrection means, I would scream that it is all too much.

. . .

A month into Easter, two weeks still to go, there is only one trace left at our house.

At every meal we sing Alleluia after we give thanks. Most of the time I don’t even want to hear it. But we all sing it. Kids warbling off-key, toddler joining in with babbles.

Even when I don’t want to, I sing it. I listen to the ones I love sing it. I know we need to sing it.

The only way that Alleluia becomes the shape of our hearts again is by singing.

Even when we want to scream. Even in the dark.

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Comments

  1. Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde says

    25 April 2016 at 8:39 am

    “Even when I don’t want to, I sing it. I listen to the ones I love sing it. I know we need to sing it.

    The only way that Alleluia becomes the shape of our hearts again is by singing.

    Even when we want to scream. Even in the dark.”

    Alleluia.

    Reply
  2. Betsy Poell says

    25 April 2016 at 8:59 am

    “I don’t know how we go on. I just know that we go on.” Said every bereaved parent everywhere. You don’t know where, or how, you just do because you have no choice. Particularly since you have other children.

    I hated Lent and Easter last year, 1-2 months after our loss. I gave up nothing, because I felt God had already taken plenty. I knew that even though Easter is the greatest cause for rejoicing ever, I still wouldn’t be whole in this lifetime. I wasn’t going to parade around like everything was okay, because it wasn’t and it isn’t.

    BUT IT IS. I can’t understand why God would do this to me or to you or to anyone, but I have to trust that He, in His infinite wisdom, is good.

    This Easter was better. I won’t ever have my daughter, but I was able to appreciate in a different way the sacrifices Mary made.she a in the same place she’s always been, but I was in a new place. To know what it is to loose a child and to do it anyway because you love other people. Wow.

    Prayers for you and your family Laura. Alleluia.

    Reply
  3. Tiffiney (Welcome Home Ministry) says

    25 April 2016 at 11:04 am

    Hey Laura,

    I’m not a catholic mommy, but I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I just love your blog. No matter how many email subscriptions I unsubscribe from, yours is a constant. Thank you so much for sharing your story of love and loss, and love again in the midst of it. I so appreciate your writing. Your blog is certainly aptly named. Blessings to you and your family, sweet mama.

    Reply
  4. Rita @ Open Window says

    25 April 2016 at 12:19 pm

    I’m so sorry. Thank you for sharing your journey with us. Thank you for letting us surround your family in prayer and get to know your sweet baby girls in heaven.

    Reply
  5. Rachel says

    25 April 2016 at 5:15 pm

    Praying for you and your family. Thank you for sharing your courageous trust in the Lord. May Mary cradle you in her arms.

    Reply
  6. Kristin Lescalleet says

    25 April 2016 at 9:02 pm

    “They had to let go of the Jesus they knew to embrace the Christ who was.” I’m going to be mulling over that truth for quite a while. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
If our daughters had lived, we never would have pl If our daughters had lived, we never would have planted this garden. 

There are pockets of beauty in my life today that could not have existed if they had survived.

Acknowledging this does not mean I accept their loss. Or that I wouldn’t trade it all to have them here instead.

But the grieving know this strange, stubborn, saving truth: that goodness can grow in the gaping holes left by the ones we love.

I don’t know any simple ways to make sense of the hard times in which we’re living. As a porous soul, I feel it all and it breaks my heart, even as I cling to what I know is true.

But loving and losing my girls has taught me that life is both heart-breaking and resilient, that surviving is more complicated than we suspect, that most people are walking around shattered beneath the surface.

Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of it, searing as sunlight: the grief in someone’s eyes behind their anger, the burden sagging their shoulders, the past that’s poisoning their present. Few things have transformed my life more than learning to recognize pain in others.

Grief is a long letting go of a life you thought you’d have. Most of us are carrying more of it than we realize—or remember when we’re dealing with each other (especially when we’re tearing each other down).

Go gentle today. Practicing compassion and generosity of spirit will crack open more of the world and its confounding struggles. You might lose the satisfying clarity you clung to before life broke your heart in complicated ways, but you will find more of God in the messy, maddening middle.

I have learned this much from the garden I never planned to plant, from a version of life I never dreamed.
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
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