Two weeks before Easter, my cousin called one evening, to talk.   She wasn't feeling well; she had the flu and felt quite tired.  We talked for a few minutes — asked after each other's husbands and kids, and promised to get our families together over the summer, just as we've done for years.  Before we hung up, I said what people always say to someone who has a cold:  "Get more rest.  Drink lots of fluids.  Don't worry, you'll be up and running in no time."  I told her I'd call and check in after a few days.

I never got the chance.  Apparently (I had no idea) a flu virus can attack our major organs.  In my cousin's case, it attacked and weakened her heart.  Just hours after I spoke to her, she was taken to the hospital for shortness of breath.  She died of congestive heart failure that night. 

"All sorrows can be borne," Danish writer Isak Dinesan once said, "if you put them into a story."  I'm not sure if that's true, but for the past six weeks, I've been testing her theory.  Trying to fit my sorrow into a bearable story.  It's very hard.  So far, I'm not having much luck.

As Christians, we tell many stories about death, some more palatable than others.  "Nothing happens in this world unless God wills it," is one of the stories I grew up with.  "He never gives us more than we can bear," is another.  "God is omnipotent, but he rarely intervenes in the natural world," is still another, and so is, "For everything, there is a season.  A time to be born and a time to die."

We also have powerful afterlife stories: "This world is not our home."  "God wanted her in heaven; he couldn't wait."  "The dead in Christ shall rise first."  "For sure, we'll see her again someday."

Until my cousin died, all of these stories were abstractions.  Pretty, but irrelevant.  I didn't have to hold any of them up to the scalding fire of a real loss.  I didn't have to care if they burned to ashes in my hands.

Now I do, because my world has changed.  Now I know what it's like to spend hours pleading for a miracle, as a loved one hovers precariously between life and death, and what it's like to experience God's earth-shattering "No."  Now I've helped little children choose outfits for their mother's funeral, and a plot of land for her final resting place.  Now I've watched a too-young widower mourn the love of his life as he also tries to be a superdad to his grieving children.  Now I understand that death comes anytime, for anyone.  Out of season, out of turn.   My cousin was exactly my age.  She was a vibrant, athletic woman.  Fit and sharp and strong.  She was not ready to go.  She didn't want to go.  Her death was an intrusion.  It was wrong.

My point is not to dismiss the faith stories I've inherited, but to confess that I can't quite fit my sorrow into them right now. They're not jagged enough; they're tepid and polite.  They move to closure too quickly.  Where is the story that will hold horror up to grace, and not flinch?

Since my cousin died, I have found it difficult to pray.  Whenever I begin, something self-protective rises up and asks God the most scandalous questions — questions that fling me far away from anything most Christians would call orthodoxy.  "Why should I bother?  What are you for?  What is the point of you?"

Whatever the answers to these questions might be, they're not what I once considered true about God.  God doesn't exist to shield me from blinding pain or premature death.  He is not "for" my physical safety or my psychological comfort.  The "point of him" is not the daily wishlist I frantically offer up in prayer.  

Which is to say: whatever intercession means, it doesn't mean anything as tidy as, "Ask and you shall receive."  Whatever God's love means, it doesn't mean I'll consistently experience God as loving.  In fact, for weeks now, I've experienced God as ominous.  As distant, withholding, and unsafe.  I doubt he's really any of those things, but grief and trauma have distorted my perceptions.  The distortion doesn't make me faithless.  It makes me human.  

My cousin died during Lent, just days before Good Friday.  So I've spent some time since the funeral dwelling in that story, the central Christian story of another young person — a vibrant, loving man — killed cruelly and out of season. 

But Jesus's story has more than one version, and the different versions tell different truths.  In John's Gospel, Jesus reigns supreme over his own death.  He experiences no agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, no crisis of faith on the cross.  He assures Pilate that he is laying down his life of his own accord.  John's Jesus is sure of his God and sure of his path.  His last word on the cross, "It is finished," is a victory cry.

Mark's Jesus is very different.  In Mark's Gospel, Jesus suffers acutely.  When he prays in Gethsemane, he tells God he's overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.  He pleads with his "Abba" for his life.  For a reprieve.  He isn't strong enough to bear the weight of his own cross, and his last word before dying is hardly a "word" at all; it's a howl.  A wrenching cry of defeat and abandonment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

If I could revise Isak Dinesan's line about grief, I would say, " All sorrows can be borne if you put them into stories."  Lots and lots of stories, each one doing its small part to challenge and deepen the others.   When I read John and Mark's crucifixion accounts side by side, what interests me is not whether one writer told a truer story than the other.  What interests me is how both stories reveal truths we cannot (and must not) live without.

Right now, I need stories of power and pain.  I need to hear Christ's triumph and his howl of despair.  To bear this sorrow, I crave a story that will dwell in death's shadow for as long as it takes for my heart to heal and say goodbye — and only then carry me to resurrection.