The F*cking Sting of Death

Content warning: mentions of suicide ideation

Four Easters ago, we awoke to a snowstorm. The streets were covered and the quiet world of lockdown became even quieter as the snow absorbed any remaining noise. It was Easter Sunday, but it might as well have been the apocalypse. Even the Methodist church across from our apartment stood shuttered and vacant. There were no egg hunts or potlucks or sunrise services. Just brutal cold and quiet descending upon a previously bustling city. 

In a depressed state the night before, I mixed a well-fed sourdough starter with warm milk and eggs, adding room temperature butter to flour, sugar, and salt, beating the mixture round and round in a Kitchen Aid until the sticky substance transformed into a soft, smooth dough. The dough rested all night, doubling in size, which I formed into 12 balls and decorated with a white cross made from a flour paste. I once read the four sections of a hot cross bun represent the phases of the moon and that the cross represents rebirth after winter.

But winter languished that year. The snow mocked my decaying soul, trapped in an apartment in a shut-down city with a depressive sadness that weighed on me like a wet blanket. 

On Easter Sunday, pastors across the country repeat the New Testament refrain, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” in a forceful condemnation of a presumed end to life. This life, we were told, is just something to pass through as a means to a celestial end. The hope is in the aftermath, in the eternal promise of resurrection. But no amount of mocking graves and death eliminates the brutal realities of loss and grief and despair. The soul may carry on elsewhere but the bereaved remain here in this present world. We have all felt the stinging nettles of death.

In 2020, everything stung—induced by the loneliness and canceled plans, the anxiety and fear of every new infectious day. I wanted to die because I wanted the stinging to end. No shame-laden message cushioned the pangs of death, the daily reminders that death was far closer than I’d realized even two months before. Resurrection is not an antidote for sorrow.

On that day four years ago, my husband and I poured Dante Cabernet in mason jars and sipped slowly while taking bites of the fresh baked hot cross buns. The tang of dry red wine mixed with the sticky sweetness of apricot jam like a disillusioned Eucharist.

Body and blood taken in remembrance of a sting closer than God himself.

People were dying and hope of heaven didn’t fix the anguish. Depression was crushing and no Christianeze appeal to just trust could dilute it.

Death, where is your fucking sting? Here, in this drafty apartment kitchen. In a lonely heart and empty stomach. In baked bread and cheap ass wine. In the snow that swirls and the oppressive silence of a vacant city street. 

In a matter of days, the snow would melt, the trees would bear the tiniest buds, the birds would sing, the neighbors would pause at the door and wave in solidarity. In death, there would be eventual life, sun bursting through parting clouds. But grief has a habit of lingering. And the body remembers, remembers the cold and the sadness and the fresh baked buns. 

It’s been four years and I have regained a desire to live though Easter remains a complicated holy day, church a complicated place. I lost a lot of myself and I am still trying to uncover her, to feel every sting because, as the poet Andrea Gibson reminds their readers, “You can’t shut yourself off to grief without also shutting yourself off to joy. Think of it like a kink in a hose. Stop the flow of sadness, you stop the flow of happiness at the same time.”

Easter has long been a holiday of celebration. Pastel hues and hallelujahs. How many times did I repeat, “He is risen indeed” without pondering the excess of death surrounding my religion? We bypassed loss in favor of gore.¹ Death was a means to a resurrection. But death is integral to the story, not because of the PSA theory of a cosmic need for sacrifice. But because of the mortality of the Christ. In human form, he was susceptible to bodily harm, to excruciating pain, to anxious sweat, overwhelming thirst, and loss of breath.

Death may not be the end end but it’s the end as we know it as far as we can see it and that’s the high cost of being human.

I’m so weary of phrases plucked from scripture used to encourage people towards singular emotions. In containing multitudes, we also feel multitudes. In feeling grief, we can, eventually, feel joy. I look back over these last few years and recognize the trauma we all carry from a world in crisis. Parts of me are still tender to it. But joy’s there too. And subsequent Easters where the sun shone and human comfort was experienced beyond apartment walls, where the wine wasn’t so bitter and the day wasn’t so cold and the stinging wasn’t so pronounced. 

Perhaps this day of holy remembrance was never meant to be a simple celebration that belittles death. What would it look like if we approached our sacred stories with our full selves—the despairing and the grieving and the stinging and the hoping? In brokenness and bloodshed, in mental anguish and human grief, in enduring hope, and surpising joy, we are here tasting and drinking and crying and remembering. Bearing witness.

1. I am thinking specifically of the popularity of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and the few sermons I heard through the years that almost seemed to relish describing every detail of Christ’s hours long torture. For years, I had dreams of a bloody Christ. I couldn’t see a crucifix without feeling a deep sense of foreboding and anxiety. Violence has a place in the story but only because it happened—not because we need to dwell on it or stoke our own fears.