Ashes to Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  In the calendar of the Church it marks the beginning of a forty day period of penitence leading up to Holy Week and the celebration of Easter.  Having been raised in the Roman Catholic Church and now as an affirmed Episcopalian, I have always marked the day by being marked.  Making that trip to church to receive ashes on my forehead.  Hearing the familiar words, ”Remember that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”

With each passing year, I find myself struggling with the meaning of Ash Wednesday.  I realize it signifies the end of the festive season of Epiphany with its Carnivals and Faschings and Mardi Gras excesses.  I understand the symbolic importance of forty days to pray, to repent, to abstain from temptations.  We are meant to reflect on the period of forty days that Jesus spent in the desert being tempted and turning from sin.  Yet, we are also told that Ash Wednesday should remind us of our mortality.  Really?

The older I get, the more I am confronted with the fragility of life and my own mortality.  In the past decade, I have experienced profound losses.  Death is always sad for those who are left behind, but some deaths come as the culmination of lives that have been fully lived.  My grandmother lived to be 97, and my husband’s grandfather lived to be 100.  May they rest in peace.  Other deaths come abruptly, extinguishing earthly lives that have been too brief.  These deaths feel unfair.  They leave me feeling helpless and confused. 

This past week, my first best friend lost her battle with cancer.  Dru and I met in the first grade and we were inseparable throughout elementary school and middle school.  We shared everything:  countless sleepovers at each others houses, our love of horses, open-faced toasted cheese sandwiches, backrubs, first crushes, first (and last) cigarettes, and so many adolescent rites of passage.   Our families both moved while we were in high school and our lives followed very separate paths for so many years.  We had reconnected only recently and I had hoped to be able to visit her this winter.  She turned 53 on January 18^th.   She died on February 3^rd.  I am so sorry I was not able to make the trip to Greenwich to see her.  My own life has become so busy and complicated, and Dru had become so fragile in her last couple of months prohibiting her from having visitors other than immediate family.  Dru’s death is just one more reminder that life is precious and can end all too soon.

Six and a half years ago, my brother David took his own life.  He was 44.  He was my Irish Twin, having been born two days before my first birthday.  Up until the day he died, I had no memories of life without him.  He was vibrant, funny, smart, enthusiastic, and full of charm.  Tragically, he lost his struggle with mental illness that he kept hidden from most of the people who knew him.  I make an effort each day to remember the love he shared with so many.  I smile thinking about the good times we had.

I do not need Ash Wednesday to be reminded of my own mortality.  Losing David and Dru and so many others my age and younger brings me face to face with mortality all too frequently.  Death sometimes smacks me right in the face, it seems.  Perhaps the point of Ash Wednesday is not to dwell on death.  We all die eventually.  That’s a given.  When I receive my ashes tonight, I will be thinking instead of the promise of Easter, the promise through Resurrection of everlasting life.

“Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth:  Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life.” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979.)