A couple of weeks ago, as I arrived at Gift of Love hospice where I go to volunteer each Saturday, I noticed that an ambulance was there. I walked inside and asked what was going on. Apparently a man who was being brought to Gift of Love, I’ll call him Martin, had died in transit. Everyone was looking for Sister Faustine to find out what she wanted them to do with the body. When she was found, she said to bring the body inside. She wanted a few hours with the body before the funeral home came to pick it up.
After the body was brought inside and laid out on a bed, sister told me to clean the body. She gave me no instructions, only that she could not do it herself out of a sense of modesty for the man Martin and to preserve his dignity. So she left the room and I was left with Martin. I have never handled a dead body before, so I was not sure how I was going to react. I was a little squeamish at first about the catheter and the rectal tube, and there was some blood coming out of various wounds. I stripped him and slowly cleaned his whole body, talking him through it since it made me feel better. Then I shampooed and combed his hair and dressed him in pants and a button down shirt. Moving him to the chapel was difficult since he was so heavy, but eventually with help I got him into the chapel and laid him out so that the other residents and sisters could come in and celebrate the prayers for the dying with a deacon who came and pray a rosary all together. Finally, the funeral home came for the body.
While I was shampooing Martin’s hair, I was brought back to an experience. That experience was one of the more powerful contemplations of my 30-day retreat almost ten years ago when I first joined the Jesuits. We had just taken Jesus down from the cross, and Joseph of Arimathea and I were carrying him on our horses, across the front of our saddles between the two horses. We came to a small stream, and we carried Jesus gently to the stream. Each person began to tenderly clean a different part of Jesus’ body. I was in charge of his head, since I was the one who had jammed the crown of thorns into him. Slowly I removed the thorns, one by one, and the blood came pouring our of his head as I did so, turning the water bright red. And then everything froze, what Ignatius calls an Application of the Senses, and we contemplated the body of Jesus, dead, lying in that small creek, the water bright red about him.
It was a tremendously moving moment for me that ten years ago, and I recalled it as I stood behind Martin, shampooing his hair and then combing it into place. This was the body of Jesus, changing color, getting stiff, with blood coming out of various wounds and cavities. Not beautiful as I would normally think of beauty. But beautiful in the way that Holy Saturday is beautiful, drawing us by its silence and absence into the mystery of Christ’s love.
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