Easter ever after

"Honey," I said to my wife last night, "I don't know what to write about." This might surprise some readers, given that all they see of me is opinions. Tony without an opinion is like an onion without the eye-stinging vapor. But believe it or not, sometimes I don't know what to think---much less write---about anything. What is there to say, really, that will matter?

We put an Easter lily on our daughter's grave yesterday. Later we had friends over, and we talked about all the things you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (none of us being polite, after all, which is one reason we get along so well): religion, family, politics, marital problems. Somewhere in the course of it my wife and I found ourselves telling them about those last weeks with Caroline---her intense pain, the fear we might kill her with morphine, the guilt over not killing her with it. We didn't mean to spill it all out like that. Sometimes I worry I talk about her too much. Other times I feel like I never talk about her at all anymore.

So I sat in my chair last night and felt the empty that is part an afterglow of unburdening and part a numbness that must be like what an amputee feels in that place where once was his arm, his leg, the part of him he never imagined he would have to live without. And then I remembered I owed something to WORLDmag.com, and so I asked my wife what I should write about.

She told me that the first Easter morning after Caroline died she thought to herself, "Oh Caroline, it's your first Easter in Heaven." Immediately afterward she heard that little girl's voice in her mind, saying, "Mommy, every day is Easter in Heaven." My wife doesn't reveal this to people very often, she says, because she figures most won't believe her, or will conclude it was her imagination. It's never happened since, just that fleeting instant.

I sat in my chair last night remembering the Easters we had with Caroline and thinking, as the darkness thickened outside our windows, that Easter is once again drawing to a close. But it never really does, does it? We see through the glass darkly, which is perhaps why sometimes the world seems grim, but in the clear light of Heaven, every day really is Easter. He is risen---not was, not once upon a time, but is. And this is why you can laugh on Easter day, even with your arm draped across the back of an empty chair. He is risen, and death has lost its hold, which means Easter doesn't end with the coming of night. He is risen, both now and ever, and unto ages of ages, amen.