I literally got to "carry the cross" this Good Friday.
I'm not an adherent of any religion, but my mother, who died almost 50 years ago, was a very devout Christian.
Her death was unbelievably horrible, too slow, too unbearable to watch and involved the literal unraveling of her mind; it was a brain tumor. I was the chief attendant for her care.
After all these decades, I still have great difficulty remembering her when she was well - I only remember the pain, the suffering - but one thing I do remember is how important Good Friday was to her before she became ill. Literally she wept for Jesus every year.
I remember it.
In the years before she got ill, my relationship with my mother was strained; I was young, stupid, and largely a fuck up. Now that I'm a parent myself I can imagine how that felt for her. She died before seeing a better me.
For a number of years, when Good Friday comes I do what no longer comes naturally to me: I go to a church and I reflect on my mother, trying to remember all the wonderful things she did, the most important of which was to teach me how to love. That made a difference in my life, defining the most important thing there is to me as my own death approaches, my marriage.
I go to various churches each Good Friday as I'm somewhat peripatetic in my day to day life for various reasons; sometimes I go when there are no services, and sometimes I show up at the services. Where there are services, they tend to be different. (My mother was an Episcopalian; I go to one of their Parishes, as Christians go, they're hardly the worst.)
I went to a reasonably local church this go around, and there was a "stations of the cross" ceremony and the priest asked that at each station a volunteer carry a real wooden cross, and another volunteer do a reading from the service.
I'm an old man now, with creaky painful bones, but it seemed right to do both, to carry the cross from one station to the next and to read text about suffering, which is what Good Friday is about; in their theology, as I recall from my youth, it is also about forgiveness.
Where my memory of my mother is concerned, forgiveness is required.
I did not anticipate being born; I do not expect to remember dying.
Faith and everlasting life are not my things.
But today, lingering after the service, alone in the Church except for a few other silent people, I could almost feel my mother there again, alive, well, healthy and I imagined her forgiving me.
I wept.
It was a worthy exercise.
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of some burden or other. When we are, we long for someone, anyone, to help us bear the weight. Sometimes a helper appears. Most often we trudge on alone.
But move forward we must.
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