4

With a Kiss

JANUARY

“Thanks for being willing to meet here today,” Kit said to her spiritual director, Russell Groves, as she welcomed him into her office.

“Happy to.”

As she prepared to close the door, she glanced down the hallway at the room where Wren was sleeping. If she woke and needed anything, Gayle was available to help. “Are you counting down the weeks?” Kit asked.

He sat down in the armchair, the brown vinyl squeaking beneath him. “Ginny is. She’s already got the cruise booked.” After decades of serving as a preaching professor at a local seminary, Russell was retiring in May. “It’ll be an adjustment, not teaching, but I keep reminding myself I can always do adjunct work if I get bored. That is, if they’ll have an old guy like me.”

She smiled and moved aside a throw pillow before settling herself on the couch. “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.” She’d had the privilege of hearing Russell preach as a guest at her church many times. His students too. They’d been the blessed beneficiaries of a gifted communicator. And she, for the past ten years, had been the blessed recipient of his prayerful attentiveness and wisdom.

“A bit of quiet?” he asked.

“Please.”

In the silence Kit centered herself in God’s presence with her favorite breath prayer: I can’t. You can, Lord. She couldn’t watch over Wren to keep her safe or make her whole. God could. She couldn’t ease Jamie’s burden of worry. God could. She couldn’t control or self-navigate the grief being tapped in her by Wren’s struggles. But God could shepherd her through the valley of the shadow and enlarge her through the journey.

“I was talking with Wren’s mom before you got here,” she said after Russell offered an opening prayer, “and the whole time I was talking with her, I could see how the Lord was playing my own words to Jamie right back to me.”

“God’s good at that.”

“Yes, he is.” Holding up mirrors for prayerful reflection seemed to be a favorite move of his.

“What echoes were you hearing?” Russell asked.

Kit rubbed her brow slowly. “She was saying how tired she is, how helpless she feels, how she wonders if her prayers even make a difference. And then how feeling powerless feeds the cycle of wanting to take control, especially if it seems God isn’t doing what she wants him to do.” She paused. “And I said to her that being alongside a loved one who’s suffering is exhausting.”

Russell eyed her with compassion. “Is that how it feels for you right now? Exhausting?”

“Not because of Wren’s needs, no. But because of what’s getting stirred up in me while I’m alongside her, the grief points that get tapped as I think about my own losses.”

Over the next half hour, she told Russell about the prayer collage exercise, the cup of guilt and regret she had been tempted to drink from again, and the letters she was writing and saving for Wren. “And of course, the way the Spirit works, the process of writing those is as much for me as it ever might be for her.”

“What’s that like for you?” Russell asked. “Writing them?”

She thought a moment, then said, “Hard. Painful. Freeing. Comforting. Another chance to see the larger picture of my healing journey and how Jesus has kept me company in it. So it’s good.” She shifted in her seat. “I had no idea when I invited Wren to stay with me that the Spirit would be working with me in such deep ways. I’m grateful for that. Always more for us to see and know and integrate. I just didn’t realize there was so much that feels undone.”

“Interesting word, that.”

“Which?”

“Undone.”

“Unfinished, I should have said.”

“But undone is intriguing.”

Yes, it was. She smiled. “Nice catch.”

“Do you want to stay with that or go somewhere else?”

She said, “I’ll play with that one later. There’s something else I’d like your ear on.”

She told him, that morning, for the first time since Casey’s death a month ago, Wren had asked to see his obituary. So Kit printed it out for her and sat beside her while she tried to read it. But looking at the obituary of a young man who should have had his life ahead of him had been yet another tap on her own heart. “I was too unwell to string any coherent and meaningful words together after Micah died, so Robert wrote his obituary. If he saved a copy, I don’t know what happened to it. But I found it online this morning in an archive. Amazing, what you can find online.” She removed from the coffee table a sheet of computer paper with a few sentences printed at the top. “I think I need to read it aloud to someone, and since you’re here . . .”

Russell leaned forward in his seat, hands cupped in his lap in a posture of readiness to receive.

“Micah Jude Simpson, age seventeen,” she began, “passed away in his sleep on March 31.” That wasn’t exactly true, she thought, but close enough. She’d found him in his bed, looking as if he had peacefully slipped away. A lump rose in her throat. “Micah is survived by his loving parents, Robert and Katherine Simpson . . .” Survived by. What a pair of words. She had barely survived his death, and their family hadn’t survived intact. “. . . his sister, Sarah, and grandparents, Beverly and William Simpson and Constance and Edward Rhodes.” All of them, except Sarah, now gone. “Micah was a senior at Kingsbury High School and planned to attend Central Michigan University to study veterinary medicine. He had a deep love for animals and books. A memorial service”—here her voice broke, and she took a moment to compose herself—“will be held at First Church in Kingsbury on Saturday, April 3, at 1 p.m. Donations in Micah’s honor may be made to the Kingsbury Animal Rescue Society.”

She smoothed the paper on her lap, then carefully folded it into thirds. She would put it in an envelope when she returned home and tuck it in the box with the photos.

Looking up at Russell with tears blurring her vision, she said, “Undone. I guess that was the right word, wasn’t it?”

He reached for a box of tissues on the end table and handed it to her.

“Thank you.” She blew her nose. “So, here’s what I’m thinking—that I might write obituaries for things that have died. I can’t remember doing anything like that for my marriage. And I’ve certainly never done anything like that for the death of other dreams along the way.”

“I love that idea, Katherine.”

“Do you?”

“As long as you feel equipped and empowered to do it.”

She reached for another tissue and wiped her eyes. “I don’t think I came up with the idea on my own.”

He smiled. “In that case . . .”

“Exactly.” She threw the tissues into her wastebasket, then pressed the obituary to her chest. “‘Let it be to me according to your word.’”

JANUARY 21

My dear Wren,

This week as a spiritual exercise, I’ve been writing obituaries. So far, I’ve written one for my marriage, one for my identity as wife, and one for my identity as Micah’s mother. There’s something healing about seeing the printed words on a page, marking the death of what was important and noting what was left behind in the wake of loss. There’s also something fortifying about taking time to name what has survived: Katherine Simpson, who died on February 21, 1983, is survived by Katherine Rhodes. No, it’s not the script I ever would have written for myself, but the story of that painful loss is a chapter in a larger story that continues to unfold. And by faith we trust that story has a happy ending.

I’ve been thinking about the Journey to the Cross Scriptures and the progression of my letters to you. Since my last one incorporated images of Gethsemane and Jesus drinking the cup for us, this one ought to be about Judas’s betrayal. I go there reluctantly, aware of my own capacity to vilify the ones who have betrayed me, while distancing myself from my own likeness to Judas Iscariot.

We all know Judas’s obituary. John gives it to us in his Gospel: Judas, son of Simon and one of the Twelve, betrayed him. The words “son of Simon” catch my attention. Judas was part of a family. His father must have been known in the early Christian community in order to be named. And what was it like for Simon, living with the shame and stigma of having been the father of such an infamous son? Though Judas’s betrayal had cosmic consequences, I’m reminded through that simple phrase “son of Simon” that every betrayal has the power to affect families and communities, not just in the short term, but for generations to come. Not that I don’t trust God’s redemption of our sins. God is able to weave a glorious story using even our failures. But I’m sobered by the thought of the damage we cause and the violence we wreak on one another through our duplicity.

On paper, my marriage survived Micah by almost one year. But it was at Micah’s funeral that I saw a woman I did not recognize greet Robert with a kiss on his cheek. In itself, that would not have been memorable or alarming. Many greeted me that day with a kiss of condolence. But her hand lingered on his longer than was fitting as she told him how sorry she was. Then she turned to me to express similar sympathy. Even though I was already plummeting into what would become debilitating depression, I was intuitive enough to see that she knew me in ways she should not have known me. And this could only have been through the intimacy of my husband’s confiding in her. I felt betrayed.

It was after I returned home from the psychiatric hospital that I found a pair of unfamiliar shoes tucked into the dark recesses of my closet—the one personal item she had neglected to remove before my homecoming. Just when I thought I was coming up for air, I descended into the abyss again. Not unlike you, pushed under by the weight of grief and loss.

And yes, by a sense of betrayal. I hear it in your questions, wondering how Casey could have kept such significant secrets from you. Yours is a loss complicated by mystery—not only the mystery of his death, but the mystery of his life. What obituary do we write when we’ll never know the truth about what was lost and why? Maybe what we write is an obituary for our need for closure and answers. Maybe someday you will write that one. Maybe there’s one for me to write too.

I know how painful it was for you, not being able to go to Casey’s funeral, and how wounding it was, being excluded and shunned by his family. Because of their anger and bitterness, you were denied an important opportunity to say goodbye to your friend in the presence of those who also love him and grieve his absence. I ache for you in this. But though we have no control over the narratives others weave about us, we don’t need to be controlled by those narratives. Today I heard in you for the first time a determination to move forward in grieving Casey in a way that both honors him and brings comfort to you, regardless of what his family has done. I’m so glad you have decided to accept Hannah’s invitation to lead a memorial service, and I will be honored to remember your beloved Casey with you.

In the meantime—in all these complex heartaches—we keep company with the One who did not withhold himself even from the pain of betrayal, who greeted Judas with the title “friend,” even while knowing what he was about to do. And while Judas was the one who agreed to “hand him over,” Jesus was the One who handed himself over first. What amazing love.

With you,

Kit