Longing brought me back to the hope of the resurrection. A longing stronger than any I had known, in the midst of a loss unlike any that came before.
Eighteen months earlier, when my father died three days after Easter, I didn’t feel the disbelief about his death that is so common among mourners, whether or not one sees and touches the body. In its place, I felt finality, nothing beyond. For months, I woke up daily with this thought: “We buried my father in the ground.”
I still joined in reciting the creeds: I believe in the resurrection of the body. . . . I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. I felt no need to differentiate myself from the gathered body of Christ in those moments. I assent to be part of a group where we claim that belief.
My father, who was not orthodox in many ways, believed that God raised Jesus from the dead and would one day raise us all. I could assent to that idea cognitively, but viscerally I felt only his absence. I could not imagine that I would ever touch or embrace him again.
When the woman who was nearly a sister to me died 18 months later, I hadn’t seen her in more than a decade, hadn’t heard her voice in years, hadn’t even written to her for 10 months after I ended communication between us. It was too painful for me in the midst of her denial about her opioid addiction. Kristen’s mother—my mother’s identical twin—died as a result of her own addiction in 2006, soon after she moved out of the house we all shared with my parents during my teen years.
Kristen and I had had a painful confrontation about her addiction. After that, it was as though she and I were stuck on different banks of a river. We both thought it safer not to attempt to cross.
For the six weeks between her death and the memorial service our family held, I wrestled with grief mixed with a sense of guilt that I had been weak and fearful, unable to summon the compassion to stay in relationship with her.
When we lived together, she and I listened to classic rock. The song that emerged most strongly from those memories after she died was the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” She loved horses, while I cared about them only in the way a younger child will follow after an adored older one. As children camping with our mothers on Assateague Island near our homes in the Mid-Atlantic, we stayed up and slept under the picnic table to try to see the untamed horses. Now in my 40s, I’ve been on a horse’s back only on a few, unmemorable occasions. Yet I imagine riding horses with Kristen in an afterlife I usually do not picture. “Let’s do some living, after we die,” Mick Jagger sings.
Like anyone who has endured a season of grief, I didn’t simply return to how I was before. I am no longer the young woman who sat outside with a friend after systematic theology class and confided in each other that we believed in bodily resurrection. And not merely metaphorically. “It is a risk to believe in it,” she said, and I nodded.
Belief, in any sense of the word, no longer fits my relationship to resurrection. I can’t be confident about it or trust it the way I trust in God’s love. How could I be confident when for 18 months this belief gave me no solace?
What’s more, belief and all its synonyms are about what happens in the mind. In each part of my body, I long to embrace Kristen again in her body, to know that she is well and whole, to feel viscerally the love that we gave and received so freely in the first half of our lives and couldn’t in the second half.
After her memorial service, I stood with cousins from both sides of her family after our families had shared a meal and looked through some belongings from her and her mother, brought by our uncles. I had already gone through the items but was still standing near the tables full of them, saying my goodbyes. An old book caught the eye of one cousin, and she picked it up and opened it. “Hey, Celeste, this is for you,” she said.
As she handed it to me, I saw my name in Kristen’s neat script on the back of a notecard printed with watercolor butterflies on the front. She had sealed it with an address label. I paused before tearing it open, with three cousins around me all holding a collective breath. Inside, she thanked me for loaning her the book (Far and Near, by Pearl S. Buck, which I had long forgotten buying). She expressed sympathy for the loss of my father, which would “be felt deeply for a long time.”
In between, Kristen wrote: “I hope one day I will be well enough physically and mentally to have a relationship with you. I appreciate you tried. Take care of yourself.”
I read these words aloud to three of Kristen’s dearest cousins, and before I realized the tears were spilling down my cheeks, I had comforting hands grasping mine and squeezing my forearms and shoulders. We were amazed and in awe that the note reached me when it so easily could have been boxed up and taken to the thrift store, the card inside likely discarded by someone who would have had no idea how to contact me.
Several months later, on the first Easter after her death, I struggled with the traditional Christian language around the meaning of the resurrection. Death’s sting is that I will live the rest of my life without the physical presence of people I loved most dearly, who loved me most dearly in return.
I long for the resurrection of the body. If we have only a teaching about heaven as it has evolved through the centuries as a place of rest for the disembodied souls of the blessed, then we don’t ever get to hold one another again, to have flesh and blood meet flesh and blood.
What the teaching of the resurrection gives us is the hope of reunion in our bodies. Although our existence ends, although we are buried in the ground, as my father was, or become a pile of bones and ash, as Kristen did, these lifeless parts of our body can be reunited. The power of God can breathe life into them. Whether or when this will happen, I say with the prophet Ezekiel, “God, only you know.”
The chances of my beloveds living again in their bodies well and whole may be better in death than they were in life, with the obstacles they were not able to surmount. Now it’s the only possibility. In the 18 months between my father’s death and Kristen’s, I moved from belief through longing to hope.
Kristen’s death has taught me about the shape of that hope. Even in the years of estrangement, knowing I lacked the emotional capacity to be with her and not talking about her much because it was painful, I never stopped hoping that we could have a restored relationship someday. Now that she is gone physically, I find I haven’t let go of that hope.
That hope does not require certainty. And I may not have been able to find it if I hadn’t let go of belief first and felt in its place deep longing for such hopes to be made real.
I long for the resurrection of the body. I hope for the life of the world to come.
This article also appears in the April 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 4, pages 21-22). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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