A Personal Take on the Women at the Foot of the Cross

Thank you all so much for your prayers and well wishes for our family. I have felt so held up and buoyed by them. Months and months ago, my parish asked me to give a retreat talk on the women at the foot of the cross. And as the time drew closer, I knew that it had to be woven together with Ellen’s story. I gave this talk on Saturday morning, through tears, and was so touched by the kindness of the women gathered there—women who shared their own losses with me, women who told me they had been praying for Ellen, women who told me they felt Ellen’s presence there, even though they had never met her. It was a beautiful, healing, holy experience. I wanted to share these words with you, too, in all their honesty and vulnerability and broken-heartedness. Thank you for being here with me, with us, as we grieve.

I didn’t really have much experience with death, at least not until very recently, when we lost my beloved Aunt Ellen after her seven-year battle with cancer. She was my mom’s sister and very best friend, and she was so much more than an aunt to me that we joked about what I should call her instead. I decided on Lovey. My mom described her, in her obituary, as a lifelong bibliophile, intellectual, raconteur, firecracker, and all-around Pied Piper. She was all that and more—the life of every party, she never met a stranger, and I think it was her tremendous faith that powered her endless stores of love—she made everyone family. She was a wonder.

We learned last August that there was nothing more the doctors could do, and that she had 6-12 months to live. She lived those months fully and courageously, and entirely at peace. She entered hospice care in January, and by February, she was very, very fragile.

I was so fortunate to be able to visit her in North Carolina one last time in February, with my mom, my other aunt, their lifelong friend, my uncle, and my cousins. And as we sat around her in the living room, I could not help but think about the women at the foot of the cross.

What I understand now that I didn’t before—what I imagine many of you knew already—is that it is a privilege, a deeply holy experience, to be with someone as they are dying. The veil between heaven and earth is so thin, and sometimes you can sense that the one you love is really more there than here. I described it to my friend as a liminal space, a border, the edge where two places meet. She told me that liminality can also mean being in both places at once. And that, I imagine, is what the women at the foot of the cross were witnessing.

For several days in early February, we kept vigil for and with my aunt. We read and knitted and passed around crossword puzzles. We stitched needlework and played music and sang Johnny Cash songs. Every now and again, my sweet cousin Lyle, in his deep Southern accent, would ask, “Mama, you reckon you want some more ice water?” We talked sometimes, and sometimes we were quiet. What was important was to be there. To accompany her. To bear witness.

Pope Francis has called us to be a church of accompaniment, to bow down before the sacred in each other. And there was so much sacred in that living room, filled with flowers and books, fluffy pillows and blankets. It was excruciatingly painful to watch someone we love beyond expression begin to slip away. But it was that same love that drew us and held us there, longing for nothing more than to spend every single moment in her presence. And that, I imagine, is how the women at the foot of the cross were feeling.

In late February, Ellen took a sharp turn, and then we were all holding vigil again—my uncle and cousins there in person, the rest of us scattered all over the world, constantly checking in and sending love and prayers, awaiting news. When she breathed her last, two weeks ago, my uncle sent the message: Ellen has stepped into the presence of God.

How significant it is, I can’t help but think, that it was women who were there until the bitter end, at the cross and beyond. I hadn’t realized until recently, while reading Marcus Borg’s excellent book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, that there may have been another reason that only the women remained. Jewish purity laws of this time, based on Mosaic law, prohibited contact with a dead body. The dead fell into the same category as lepers and people with various diseases and discharges; contact with them required ritual cleansing. This, Borg posits, is probably part of the reason why the priest and the Levite passed by the man on the side of the road, while the Good Samaritan stopped to help him. The man is described as half-dead, and they may have been afraid to get close enough to tell whether he was still breathing.

This was of no concern to the grieving women when they stood at the foot of the cross. It was of no concern to them when they watched Joseph of Arimathea wrap Jesus’ body in a linen shroud and place him in the tomb. It was of no concern to them as they set out, on Sunday morning, to anoint his body with spices.

When we lost Ellen, one of my dear friends sent me a beautiful quote from the Latin funeral rite: Vita mutator non tollitor. Life is changed, not ended. And indeed, we did hear this line, in English, at Ellen’s beautiful funeral mass. “Death is so cruel and startling,” my friend said, “but it isn’t the entire story.” And when life changed, not ended for Jesus, it was the women at the foot of the cross, and then at the tomb, who were the first to understand that, the first to spread the word.

The women not only stayed at the cross, but they stayed at the tomb, long after everyone else had left. They came back, again and again. And what I understand now that I didn’t understand before is that they were probably grasping wildly to conceive of a world that didn’t have their beloved one in it. They had no expectation that they would ever see him again. They only wanted to care for his body, to remain with him in any way that they could.

And it was because they were there that they were the first witnesses to the resurrection. Gospel accounts differ slightly and offer varied viewpoints, but John tells us that after Mary Magdalene showed Peter and John the empty tomb, the disciples went home. Mary stayed. And that’s why she was the only one to see the two angels who told her not to weep, the only one to see the risen Jesus in the garden. It’s why she was the first to say, “I have seen the Lord.”

In our patriarchal culture, our patriarchal church, women are not always afforded their rightful place, as bearers of the image of God, as people with unique and extraordinary gifts to offer to the church and to the world. And yet, women are so central to the gospel, to the church, to the everyday functionality of the world. We are called, like Mary Magdalene, to accept the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, in our lives, in our ministry. We are called to stand in the places where no one else will stand, to offer the gifts that only we can bring. May we, like Mary Magdalene, like the women at the foot of the cross, afire with love, step forward.

I was asked many months ago to write a reflection to share with you today, and I had no idea that it would coincide with this tragic time in my life. But it has helped me to realize that as humans and as believers in the love of Christ and the mystery of God, we are living these stories in our own lives. In joy, in grief, in confusion, in longing…there is a story to hold us. There is no emotion that is foreign to Jesus or to the women in his life. There is no experience we can have in which Jesus or the women who accompanied him will not meet us, embrace us, journey with us.

We laid Ellen to rest one week ago. She planned her entire funeral—the Scriptures, the hymns, the holy cards—to comfort us. Ever the magpie, she chose her own elegant pale purple shimmery coffin. She wore her favorite turquoise silk dress and one of her favorite pairs of socks, the ones that say, “This girl takes no shit.” She picked out her own headstone, which says, “Reading makes you smarter.”

I wish that I could tell you that I felt that comfort, that joy at her visitation and funeral, as we arranged her beautiful artwork to display, spread the copious flower arrangements throughout the room. As we prayed the rosary, as my dear cousins courageously read the Scriptures she chose. As my dad helped to carry her coffin, as I held my mother and wept. As we each took a flower from the roses on her casket, as the priest prayed the final blessing. It was terribly, terribly hard, all of it.

But I also felt her love radiate through that room in the funeral parlor, through the church, through the cold wind at the cemetery. I saw the love that bound us all together, a big crowd of people, each touched by Ellen’s life and love in a unique way. I saw that underneath our overwhelming grief was gratitude that we had known this love at all. I saw the way that we held each other up, supported each other, as we took turns sobbing. And I see the way that we are keeping vigil for each other even now, checking in with each other multiple times a day. And because I have seen these things, I, too, can say, as Mary Magdalene did, “I have seen the Lord.”

Sitting with you by the tomb,
Cameron