The Last Supper

Mom and Dad didn’t just come out and tell us that Jesus was ill. Parents are rarely that direct with their children. Rather, they became angry easily and forgot basic things like packing mine, Jesus' and Little Mary's lunch for school. Often, they closed themselves in their room and argued. Later, I would learn that they were not arguing because they were mad at each other, but because they were just scared and concerned and they could not express it to anybody else. My parents took turns pacing behind the closed door with heavy hushed voices and allowed fear and innuendo out. They repeatedly assured Jesus, Little Mary and me that everything was all right even though we knew it could not possible be.

The day I learned that Jesus was going to die was March 12, 2002. I will not forget that date for the rest of my life. If I knew the terrible turn our lives were to make as that day drew to a conclusion I would have grabbed each second and held on tightly so as not to let a single moment slip by me. I know that a time will come when I will be in my sixties bouncing a grand-Mary on an arthritic knee and on March twelfth I will take a moment to think of my little brother and the light that fluttered in the wind. I say fluttered because even a hurricane could not extinguish his flame.

The morning sky greeted us with clouds and darkness prompting Little Mary to ask Mom when nighttime was going to be over and the day would begin. The sky was an ocean of undulating gray and black. Waves crashed with crests of electric light. It made staying inside our warm home feel like a vacation. Even lying around with Jesus and Little Mary seemed like a treat. It rained through most of the morning and early afternoon. Our hearts were shaken by loud thunderous claps as we crawled under the blankets and sofa pillows that we had assembled into a fort. Our eyes lit with streaks of lightning. The day felt alive and we along with it.

Jesus, little Mary and I passed most of the day by playing board games. Dad said they call them board games because you played them when you were bored. Dry, within the confines of our home, we plowed through the land of Gooey Gumdrops, spent an expensive evening in a hotel at Park Place and made each other feel Sorry as often as possible as we tried to get our four men home.

Shortly after lunch and with little forewarning the storm dried up. The sun came out of hiding to reconstruct our day. The rain that seemed to pound all morning long had made everything fresh; it had baptized our world. The trees, the grass, and the air: all seemed new after the downpour. The air felt heavy with the scent of rain. That was okay, because I loved the smell of rain in the air.

When the day changed, we changed also. Jesus, Little Mary and I jumped out of our pajamas and into some blue jeans and sweatshirts. The three of us ran outside to splash in puddles and make mud pies. We swam through the tall wet grass, flew with our heads stuck in cumulous clouds and basked under the protection of the sun. When we returned to the house we were covered from the tops of our heads to the bottoms of our toes with patches of mud and blades of grass prompting Mom to spray us off with a hose and then usher us straight into the bathroom for a wash.

“Bath before dinner.” Jesus protested as he disrobed. Mom winced at the sight of his thin body.

"Are you losing weight," she said.

Jesus did not reply. How would he know? He splashed into the tub. The water level in the tub failed to rise more than the thickness of a piece of paper. Jesus looked at Mom his face shrouded in guilt as if to say some things should never be seen.

I waited until Jesus was done drying off before entering the bathroom to take my shower. As I went into the room I took a second look at how thin Jesus appeared. He stood there with little more than a transparent layer of skin covering his bones and a heavy towel wrapped around his waist. I could trace his spine as it poked through the skin of his back. He was like a reptile or a shellfish with an exoskeleton. I tried to put it out of my mind as I cleaned up, but the sight of his translucent body made me worry. It was like he had already become a ghost.

The smell of mom’s cooking seemed to right everything and for a little while I stopped thinking about my parents’ conversations and Jesus looking so thin.

Mom had cooked dinner, which for starters meant no manna. Mother Mary roasted the juiciest chicken known to mankind. The meat fell from the bone in soft, wet chunks. Its aromatic steam filled the kitchen air and brought eager cries from my stomach. Mashed potatoes with thick, country gravy, steamed carrots drowning in melted butter and double chocolate cake with extra rich icing finished up the meal. I thought Mom may have been trying to make us all fat and was then again reminded of Jesus’ spine.

Dad said grace, thanking himself for all of creation, and then using my fork as a plow I made trenches through the potatoes and watched the gravy flow. Jesus laughed as Dad provided an account of the all-nighters he pulled with his artistic engineers as they struggled to fill the world with a menagerie of animals. He described what he thought was the most absurd animal of all creation. I think it was the platypus.

I studied Jesus from across the dinner table. He looked sick. How long could he have been this way? How could I have missed it? His cheeks sucked into his mouth and you could see the line of his jaw. He looked out of pale eyes that held dark circles like the valences that hung in the living room.

We did not talk about the way Jesus looked. I started to say something to mom and she told me to mind my own appearance and that Jesus looked just fine. She had brought Jesus to the doctors three times in the last two weeks and each time he had said that Jesus was fine. As an exclamation point to her words she plopped down on Jesus’ plate a second helping of mashed potatoes loaded with gravy.

There were other things that we did not talk about. Like how Jesus started taking naps and how his nose bled everyday. Mom had called our doctor when the nosebleeds started and the doctor told Mom that they were probably just growing pains, but Jesus didn’t seem to be in pain and with all his weight loss I kind of thought he was shrinking rather than growing. When the bleeding didn’t stop in a week, the doctor performed some blood work and then reassured Mom and Dad that everything was normal. The relief that settled in after the doctor called with the positive test results only lasted until the next nosebleed. Then the concern returned.

Dad had just said something about how he had wanted to give platypuses hands, no arms, just fat hands protruding from their enormous bodies so as to paddle the water along their sides. I thought about how funny the platypuses would look trying to pop plankton into their mouths with those little hands when Jesus snorted, spraying all of us with creamy potatoes.

Only it wasn’t potatoes; it was blood.

“Jesus,” I cried, “put a hand over your face when you sneeze.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled with a trickle of blood beginning to drip from his nose. He wiped his face with the back of his hand leaving a crimson smear.

“Oh, no honey,” Mom said. She was the first to realize that it was blood instead of potatoes. Mom stood up with a napkin and started to wipe the blood away. Her face crumbled as if hit by a fist and I could see her fight to hold back a cry. “You’re okay, don’t worry about it.” Her voice cracked and I struggled to understand why. It was just another nosebleed.

Mom sat back down in her place. She seemed confused. She tried to eat but dropped her fork in her plate and it let out a loud clang that made Little Mary jump. Mom then put her hand to her mouth and started to cry.

“Dear,” Dad said but Mom was already stumbling up from the table. Mom’s hands were trembling and her legs looked unsteady like when you were sick with the flu, only she hadn’t been coughing. Her face had gone ghostly white.

“I don’t feel well,” her voice broke. “Why don’t you all just finish dinner; I need to go lie down in the bedroom.”

Mom rushed from the table and we all knew that it wasn’t a cold but Jesus’ nosebleed that had made her sick. Dad sat with us and we finished the rest of the dinner in silence. Only I wasn’t very hungry so rather than eat I just moved my food around the plate until Dad excused us.

Jesus held his nose pressed tight so as to stop the bleeding. He said that he was sorry and his voice sounded funny like when he had a cold. Dad told him that it wasn’t his fault but you could tell that Jesus still felt the guilt of a confused child. That was Jesus; he always acted like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Sometimes it was like he was born to suffer.

Dad asked me to watch the others and what I did was watch them go into Little Mary’s room. Jesus and Little Mary sat down and started playing with Power Rangers and Barbie Dolls. The Barbies were trying to get the Power Rangers to stop fighting and hang out at the beach. I left Jesus and Little Mary to their dolls and snuck down the hall and sat just outside of Mom and Dad’s bedroom. They weren’t yelling but they weren’t talking nice either. Mom was still crying.

“It’s not fair,” I heard mom say. “He’s only nine. I thought I had until he was thirty-three.”

God didn’t say anything; he just looked down at his feet. I looked at those feet through the space between the doors. The feet were big, covered with blue socks that had fluffy threads beading up like dew on petals. I didn’t see any answers in them and wasn’t sure why Dad studied them so intently.

“When you asked me to have your son, how could I say no to you,” Mom continued. “I loved you so much and I wanted to carry part of you in me. Create with you. I didn’t know what I was agreeing to,” she sobbed. “If it wasn’t bad enough knowing he would die, I also knew that he will have to suffer. Knowing all that as I felt him developing within my body. When I felt that first movement I already knew that I would have to watch him pass. It’s not fair to ask that of a mother.”

“Mary, you know this has nothing to do with me being God. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it is just growing stuff like Doctor Rodriguez said. The blood work all came back normal. We can bring him back in to the doctor’s office tomorrow and get him checked out again.”

“Oh come on. It’s not just the nosebleeds. Look how thin he is. A child his age shouldn’t be losing weight. And taking naps. I know it’s not good. Even you can’t deny that.”

Dad finally gave in to Mom. His struggle had been brief but he had already lost hope before the fight had even begun. “I know you’re right. I just feel so helpless. I feel as though I have no control. All my life I have believed like I authored my destiny, that while I could not direct the circumstances at least I could govern my reaction. And now...now I feel like even my emotions are in the hands of another. So desperately I want to help him, Mary. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there is anything that I can do that will change anything. I feel helpless.”

“I felt him growing inside of me,” Mom sobbed. “I remember his first kick. Do you remember when he just learned to sit up? He was so proud of himself, he would smile. Remember that big smile he made when you walked into the room? I lived with this fear, though, like anyone must who has lost a child in the past. Each milestone carried the weight of inevitability. How do you think I felt realizing that I was raising a sacrifice to mankind? Somehow, I was strong for him. I was determined to make him happy. But now you take him early. And like this. I always thought that he would suffer but not the slow consuming death of cancer.”

“Don’t say that word,” Dad hushed. “We don’t know yet.”

“Oh come on, get your head out of the sand.”

Dad stopped looking at his socks and began pacing back and forth listening to her, but not saying much. When he did speak it was only to say that it was out of his control and he didn’t know it would happen like this. He tried to tell her that he was losing a son also. That he didn’t want to see Jesus suffer. He loved his son as much as any of his children, even more than himself. But it didn’t seem right to compete in grief.

I began to cry, but not loud enough for them to hear. I sat in the hall, my knees grasped firmly against my chest and I rocked. This was not happening. This was not our life. Jesus was okay.

“He’s wasting away,” mom yelled and I jumped back from the anger in her voice. It was a mean anger, rather than a hurt anger. It carried with it accusations, threats and heat. It still scares me today because I had never heard that sound in her voice before. I think it scared her also because afterwards there was a long silence. Next she spoke in a much weaker voice. “How long will he suffer?” she asked.

Dad shook his head and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Mary, I don’t know. Life has to work at its own pace and in its own way. Knowledge of the future is not necessarily absolute. It’s like knowing a red light will turn green, but you don’t know the exact time.”

“And death?” Mom asked.

“Mary, you know what I believe,” Dad replied, “life and death are the same.” And that’s when I knew the truth. Jesus wasn’t going to be with us much longer.

My tears were starting to bring whimpers with them and I knew I had to go back to the room with Little Mary and Jesus. I didn’t want to get in trouble for spying. In a way, however, I was terrified to go back into that room. I was afraid to be near him, afraid that Jesus might see my fear. Afraid that seeing him would break me apart. But I also knew that I longed to be near to Jesus. I longed to sit down and play as if nothing was wrong because maybe if I could do that then everything might just be all right.

I desperately wanted to go hold Jesus and tell him how much I loved him but I didn’t want to upset him. I knew he would hug me back and tell me that everything would be okay because that was how Jesus was. I knew that I could not go into the room. Not now. So I ran outside and lay down in the wet grass. I didn’t care that it was wet. It all seemed so unimportant and I couldn’t help but wonder why God brought Jesus into my life only to take him away.