"I'd rather lose my mind, than lose my son and my husband and my family."
That quote came from an episode of Touched by an Angel - "Shallow Water". A woman who submitted her mind, her memory and her life to mental illness in order to spare herself the horror of what happened to her family.
I watched that episode again today. Another quote came in the same episode as a response to this woman's mental block of her tragedy from the woman's father-in-law.
"Maybe it's better if she didn't remember. I wish I didn't remember."
There were two very different responses to the common tragedy. The woman denied the existence of the tragedy but blocking it out of her mind, and her father-in-law denied the seriousness of the tragedy by pretending his son was still alive, even though he was brain dead. Both had lost sons in the same accident. Both were in denial that their sons were gone.
Leading up to Good Friday, I am asked to remember that someone died. Instead of pretending that this tragedy didn't happen or pretending that it happened but there would be a miraculous event to end my sadness... I am letting go. I am unplugging the machines, I am facing reality. I am going to find some flowers to lay at the grave of Jesus.
