No Time for Questions

 

No Time for Questions

(“So Mary and Martha sent someone to tell Jesus, ‘Lord, your dear friend Lazarus is sick.’” John 11:3)

I read the letter halfway to home,
and finished it arriving in the driveway. There were
requests I could not fulfill,
anxiety I could not quell. But I knew love,
the old love,
the complete love that befriends nearly everyone
with a heart wide open like the North Dakota plains.

How many friends did you have, how many did you
cover with blankets of warm summer evening comfort?

Even now there are loved ones whose breath is shortened
by the unwelcome infections of dis/ease. Even now,
at the end of the letter, are the pleas for presence
and the possibility of miracles. Anything can happen,
any time the pressure can ease around the bed of the
frail and beloved friend.

Even now the street lights beckon, leading me home.
Even then the questions spun like uncertain diagnoses
and breakfast bringing up the last part of the morning.
No one ate that day, no one could. Everyone cried,
everyone revived their hope that this would not be the ending.

We pulled up next to the house, we heard the crying
over the lumbering engine. We cried too, how could we refuse;
there were tears from the front door to the kitchen and turning sharply
to the dimmed room halfway down the hall.

We opened the door, and we knew the sickness together.
We left extra late and arrived slightly early. We sat with
the illness speaking between us. It was certain that death
had filled the room and smirched our hopes. Taking his hand
we implored mightily, joined our voices with the others crying
for your vitality. But your breath faded, slow, one or two
lungfuls left. Your heart listened until the final groggy beat.

Where was he, the miracle worker? How did I get there before
he arrived? What would come of tomorrow with our friend
all but dead? What faith could we borrow once he was entombed?
His sisters had sat with him the whole long day. And now they
exhaled a breath they had held for nearly four days long. The
tomb was ready. The time was now. And I offered to wrap him
in strips of linen for the friends to carry him to the grave.

We cried because he could have been saved. We had seen the
chosen
one
cure even worse maladies and late. Why wasn’t he here,
why did he delay. We had no time for questions. It was time
to lay him on the bier and try to sleep the night away.