She Buried Her Daughter Twice

What's happening

This Sunday is Mother's Day. The Free Press this week publishes an excerpt from Danielle Crittenden's new memoir, Dispatches from Grief. On February 16, 2024, her 32-year-old daughter Miranda, a brain-tumor survivor, died in her sleep when a small miscalculation in her hormone medication killed her.

The excerpt describes a year later: the Jewish tradition of the unveiling, a ritual that "merciful[ly] acknowledg[es] that mourners need a full cycle of seasons before facing granite finality." The family chose to bury Miranda a second time, in a wooded place where wildflowers could grow instead of mowed grass.

What the Text says

Jeremiah names a sound coming from the road north of Jerusalem.

Jeremiah 31:15Thus says Yahweh: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.

Rachel had been dead for centuries when Jeremiah heard the cry. He places it at her tomb because Ramah was where surviving children of Judah were assembled before being marched into Babylonian captivity. The Hebrew ki einennu, "because they are not," is the line.

Rachel is not refusing comfort because comfort is unavailable. She refuses it because the children are gone, and she will not exchange the cry for a meaning. Matthew quotes the same verse when Herod kills the children of Bethlehem. The text leaves the cry intact.

The reflection

Mother's Day arrives Sunday for the women whose mothers are alive. It arrives also for the women whose children have died, whose mothers are gone, whose families have come apart, whose hoped-for children never came.

Crittenden moved her daughter's grave because rigid rows of black headstones did not feel right. The wildflowers were a small thing. They did not bring Miranda back. The Bible does not pretend they would. Psalm 88, the only psalm that does not resolve into hope, ends in darkness. The text does not require the bereaved to lift.