The Lessons of Good Friday

The Boston Herald

'He taught us so much more about life than he did about death.'

This is what the mother of 21-month-old Kyle Fitzpatrick said this week, after her son succumbed to a 10-month battle with leukemia.

He taught us more about life than he did about death. The words stand out because they come from a woman who might just as easily have screamed, 'Why? Why was my son born to suffer? Why did he have to go through this? Why did we all have to go through this?'

At one point, perhaps still, she asks these questions inside her head. 'Why' is what we always ask. Why are we here? What is the purpose of our lives? Why are we given so much only to have it taken away?

A letter arrived for my 17-year-old Monday. Her friend's brother, a high school senior whose cancer had been in remission, is sick again. It doesn't look good, her friend writes. His only chance, and it's a slim one, is a bone-marrow transplant. My friend Anne phoned a while later. She had just returned from the funeral of a friend's 26-year-old son who had been fighting cancer since he was 18.

Then my father called and told me about his friend, another cancer patient, who until a few weeks ago appeared to be in the best of health. 'He looked great. He looked fantastic,' my father said.

Now he has only weeks to live.

So much pain, so much tragedy and loss. It never ends. Every day there are different names but the same sad stories. What's it all about? What's it all for?

'He's like a little angel who was sent here for a special reason, to pull people together,' Cindy Fitzpatrick told a Herald reporter, the day after her baby died.

Her statements are at the core of a faith Christians around the world are supposed to be reflecting upon today. Good Friday is the darkest day in the church calendar because it looks, at this moment, as if Jesus Christ lived and suffered and died for nothing. As if we all live and die for nothing.

Easter debunks this notion. But on Good Friday we don't know this. We stand in the long shadow of the cross, in despair and defeat, empty and drained, questioning all we were promised. Cindy Fitzpatrick is standing in the shadow of her own cross, empty and drained, and yet she is somehow able to see beyond this cold, hollow moment, back to what was and ahead to what will be, because her son for a time lived on this earth. He changed people. He pulled them together, family and strangers, alike. Two thousand enrolled as bone marrow donors because of him. Others sick with cancer will be helped because of him. Adults and children worked together because of him. Those who knew him and visited him, and those who only read about him and prayed for him, were changed because of him. 

Every life affects other lives, though some more than others. Kyle, in his short time on Earth, touched more people than he ever knew. 

In the throes of sickness and grief and imminent loss, people tend to pull together. They care for one another. They reach out to give, and they reach out to take. They do what they were instructed to do They love one another. They build bridges instead of walls.

But why does it take cancer, a crucifixion, some cataclysm, to unite people?

'The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss,' Thomas Carlyle wrote in the mid-1800s. Most people miss the love Kyle got. Most people don't even believe in that kind of love. But it's out there, not just in Haverhill where he lived, and in Charlestown and Somerville where they had block parties for him, and in South Carolina where he was treated, but everywhere.

That's the point. The cross is inevitable. You have to go through Good Friday before you get to Easter Sunday. We all have to suffer and die.

But not alone, and not without support. We are here for one another. What matters isn't so much that we die, but that we live, that we impact people and that we leave something behind.