Immortal Beloved
Maria McFadden
July 1, 1995
On December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, my brother Robert died. He was thirty-four. I'll never forget the shock I felt the day he told me he had cancer. I knew he had been to the doctor for back pain, and, as a worrier, I was concerned. But, I thought, what are the chances of it being serious? Our father had just been diagnosed with cancer five months previously, and I didn't think the disease would strike the family again so soon; besides, Robert was young and hearty. But the disease did strike and, while my father has so far been spared, my brother is gone.
It has been hard to accept the death of someone so young; hard for my parents to accept that their child has died before them; hard for me to lose my closest sibling and great friend. Most of all, death, the finality of it, has been a great weight on my faith, because suddenly it is crucial that what I as a Christian profess to believe is true. Without the Christian promise of the resurrection, death really is an end, and love has meaning only in memory. When you lose someone, there is that tiny voice of fear: what if death really is it, and I won't see my loved one again?
Sometimes when we are young, the Christian faith can seem essentially about how we live-do we try to follow the Gospel, seek justice, spread Christ's words and his love? We know that our faith-story involves the conquering of death, but if we have not yet lost someone close to us, the actual experience of death can seem far off and unreal. When it happens, we are caught unaware: we didn't know it would be like this. I know that Robert, as a young practicing Catholic, didn't expect his faith would be about how to die. And yet it was. For fourteen months he struggled with his disease and fought ...
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