Anger

"This feels so personal!" I sobbed to Mark one night in January. 

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"The way she's dying is all the nightmare scenarios I've ever had, and worse. My teenage fascination with strange diseases - Black Death and Ebola, plus all the grotesque things I learned about in nursing school that I've never wanted to witness... It's like someone peered into my brain, collected my ideas of the most grizzly ways to die, and made my beautiful sister drink that cup."

"There's no such thing as magical thinking," I thought to myself, "but now I wonder..."

---

Tears of grief, sorrow for life without Heidi, come more frequently these days as the numbness of that season wears off, but those tears are outnumbered by tears of anger, and never more than when I remember how she lived through death incarnate.

Outside of family, there were three people of whom I'm aware that visited her in that final week, and witnessed the extent of the destruction of Heidi's living body. In the moment I experienced a grace that made the monumental horror of it somehow bearable; that to be with her was better than being apart. It surprised me to be able to say in all sincerity, "She is still beautiful." But I was protective of exposing even her good friend. On the caring bridge site, I asked for prayers for her skin, mentioned amputation, but we kept, and will keep - at least for the time being - the details to ourselves.

Of all of the burdens of that season, this is the one that makes me burst at the seams and spill hot, angry tears. It is a burden that I can't share because it is too much for others, but it is also a burden I can't not share. So I collapse in the shower, I tremor when I think of it, I desperately wish you knew for my sake, and desperately hope you never do, for your own.

And in all this, where is God? He is here, just like He was there. I run to Him and unleash my anger, my heart screaming and fists pounding against him like a child tantrumming at their beloved parent. He is the cause but He is also the remedy. I don't understand, but I trust Him with my anger. It is my offering because it is all I have, and I have heard and believe that He can transform it, but only when it is offered freely. So I offer it again and again. 

On our bedroom wall hangs a watercolor of the crucifixion, given to us about a decade ago by the woman who, as it turns out, is the current homeschool art teacher for the Keiser kids. The painting caught my eye shortly after Heidi's funeral, but with an unusual familiarity. It is Heidi in her final days: her sleeping face, her body, the painted light and shadow stunningly accurately portraying her disfigurements. It is both of them, Christ and Heidi, together.