3

Taking the Cup

JANUARY

When Hannah arrived at her regular time on Sunday afternoon, Kit greeted her with an embrace, her ears tuned to any sound of movement from Wren upstairs. But it was quiet. Not even the creak of a mattress to acknowledge the chime of the doorbell. “Come on in. I can put the kettle on if you’ve got time.”

“Wish I did. But I’ve got to get back to the church for a funeral.”

Kit hung her coat and scarf in the closet. “That’s a long day for you.”

“It is, but I’m taking tomorrow off.” She followed Kit into the kitchen. “How’s she doing?”

“About the same. I managed to coax her into eating some soup earlier, so that’s a victory. For both of us.”

Hannah opened her bag and removed her communion supplies. “Is she awake?”

“Last time I checked. I told her you were coming, so we can head upstairs.”

When they reached her room, the bedroom door was open, and Wren was sitting beneath her blanket clutching Casey’s beanie to her chest, the Van Gogh prints Kit had given her at Christmas side by side on her lap.

Hannah greeted her and sat in the chair beside the bed. “I recognize one of those,” she said, pointing to Starry Night. “What’s the other one?”

Wren took a moment, then said, “Olive Trees.”

“They’re beautiful,” Hannah said. “Is it okay if I move them out of the way so we don’t spill anything on them?”

Wren murmured her okay and Hannah propped them up on the long bureau so they would be visible from the bed.

Kit pulled up a desk chair. If Wren was being deliberate about looking at Vincent’s art again, that was encouraging. While Hannah poured grape juice into her carved olivewood chalice, Kit gazed at the paintings, each churning with emotion, and wondered if Wren was able to find comfort in them as she had before. Maybe her thoughts would return to Jesus in Gethsemane and the consolation she’d discovered when she considered the terror he had experienced there. “The stoic ones bug me,” Wren had once confided, referring to the common artistic renderings of Jesus engulfed in soft light in the garden, serene and surrendered, eyes lifted heavenward. “There’s nothing comforting in them.”

Kit agreed. Show him writhing in anguish, pleading for the cup to be removed. Show the Word made flesh—the same Word that spoke everything into being—show the Word groaning words to the Father that would go unanswered. Show him sweating, crying, wrestling. And then—only then—show him yielding to the Father’s plan.

“In the same way,” Hannah was saying, “after supper he took the cup . . . ”

He took the cup. These were the words Kit pondered while Wren opened her mouth like a small child to receive the bread Hannah placed on her tongue.

He took the cup. And he offered it to his friends to drink so that they might participate in the new covenant, sealed in his blood. He took the cup.

But he also asked the Father to take the cup. He begged the Father to take the cup of suffering, judgment, wrath, and affliction and remove it from him. In the end, Jesus would take this cup too. And he would drink it to the bottom.

She watched Hannah tip the cup to Wren’s lips so she could drink. As Wren stared at Hannah while she sipped, something in her eyes—a poignant mixture of sorrow, trust, and a longing for hope—summoned an image from Kit’s well of memories. “Take it,” she’d said, holding the cup to Micah’s lips. “You’ll feel better.” He had stared at her, his eyes a mixture of pain, trust, and yes, a longing for relief. And he drank it to the bottom.

“Katherine.”

Kit was startled by the sound of her name and looked up to see Hannah holding out the bread and cup for her. “Do this and remember me.”

Kit took the bread. She took the cup. But the remembering was a sword through her heart.

After Hannah left and Wren went back to sleep, Kit knelt in her study, searching through a stack of pictures she’d never put into albums. If the Holy Spirit was asking her to take the cup of remembering and drink it to the bottom, then she needed to see her son in one of his last photos.

These images too, she thought as she dug through the box, could make a fine collage of sorrow: Micah at his tenth birthday party, sitting with cake and balloons at a restaurant table with Sarah and one of her friends because his closest friend wasn’t close enough, evidently, to be bothered to come; Micah sitting alone on the bench during a middle school basketball game, his uniform loose on his small frame, watching the larger boys skillfully maneuver along the court; Micah in a tuxedo, standing with Sarah and her prom date in a decorated auditorium, because the girl who had agreed to go with him had ditched him at the dance.

Would it have been so hard, Lord, to give him the gift of one friend?

She touched the face of her sad and lonely boy, then kept digging until she found the photo she was looking for: Micah in a leg cast, the white plaster bearing witness to his isolation, the few signatures, doodles, and “Get well” wishes scrawled by the hands of family members, not peers. She removed the picture from the box. If there were photos of that last Thanksgiving together, they had long ago been lost. Or maybe they had ended up in boxes Robert removed from their house after the divorce. It was his side of the family that always gathered together for the Thanksgiving Day meal and a game of football, even in snow. His sister would host the gathering at her house and pretend she hadn’t instructed Dylan and Patrick, both a few years older than Micah, to include their cousin in their fun. On more than one occasion Kit had overheard them groan in protest.

But on that last Thanksgiving together, when Dylan and Patrick were home from college, they did invite Micah to play. He hadn’t wanted to; Kit could tell. He would have been happier reading a book in a corner, out of everyone’s way. But Robert and his nephews had pestered him—they needed one more player so the teams would be even—so Kit urged him to put his book away for a little while and join the fun. A bit of harmless fun.

But it wasn’t harmless. One hard tackle from one of the neighbor boys led to one awful cracking sound, to one piercing howl, to one trip to the hospital to treat one compound fracture, to one leg in an immobilizing cast, to one dose of codeine. One, which led to another, which led to another. And when the liquid codeine stopped working, morphine worked fine. In the end it wasn’t Micah’s experimenting with illegal drugs that killed him. It was the legal ones.

And she had held the cup for him to drink.

JANUARY 14

My dear Wren,

I’m thinking tonight about cups—both the cups I have resisted and the cups I have drunk from. Watching you drink from Hannah’s communion cup stirred many thoughts and feelings for me. I think it was the expression of trust and longing in your eyes as you drank, as if you truly wanted to believe that the words she offered you are true and that the presence of Christ is real. I saw sorrow. I saw weariness. But I also saw hope. I was grateful to see that glimmer again.

After you went to bed, I searched through old family photos for one of Micah, taken a few months before he died. I don’t know how much your parents ever told you about Micah’s death. It was fairly common knowledge that Micah died of a drug overdose, deemed accidental. That detail is a story for another time, I think. Enough to say that my son was sad and lonely. His counselor was trying to help him deal with his depression. But Micah began to self-medicate with marijuana and alcohol. I was concerned enough to try to get him into a residential treatment program. His father and I disagreed, though, and I lost the argument.

A few months later Micah was injured while playing football with Robert, your dad, and some cousins and neighbors. The doctor at the hospital prescribed painkillers for him. I made sure he took them regularly as prescribed. What I didn’t realize is that he became dependent on them and that he started using them to medicate not only his physical pain but his emotional and mental pain too.

People typically assign blame when they hear “drug overdose,” and especially with teenagers, people can wonder how parents can “let it happen.” Believe me, I cast plenty of blame on myself for Micah’s affliction. I also cast plenty of blame on God for not delivering him from it.

Tonight I felt led into remembering Micah in a way I haven’t let myself do for a very long time. Drinking the cup of remembrance can be a painful experience, and we must go prayerfully at the Holy Spirit’s bidding. As I drank that cup, another cup also appeared: the cup of guilt and regret. It’s a bitter cup, Wren, full of poison. Nothing good can come from drinking it. It’s a cup the Lord longs to remove from us.

I’ve heard you say it’s your fault Casey died, that you didn’t do enough or see enough or love enough. I felt the same way after I lost Micah. Maybe in the stupor of our sorrow we’re so desperate to feel anything, we’ll choose self-inflicted wounds of blame over the promise of comfort. Or the freedom of grace.

Tonight, instead of drinking that bitter cup to the dregs, I was able to remember that Jesus drank it for me. All my shame, all my guilt, all my failures—all of it was in the cup of affliction he willingly drank. He drank it so I wouldn’t have to. So you wouldn’t have to.

I guess I didn’t realize I still had that cup. I’m grateful the Lord shined light on it. I’m asking him to take that cup away from you, even as I’ve asked him to take it away from me. Again.

With you,

Kit