The problem with personal grief is that you can’t prepare for it. About 10 years ago, both of my parents passed away — my dad from Crohn’s disease and, a year later, my mom from a combination of illnesses, including Parkinson’s. But I think the greatest of these illnesses was heartbreak: I always suspected my mother simply could not live without my father for very long.
As Catholics, we’re accustomed to preparing for the liturgical seasons of the Church. Lent, the season we’re in now, helps us prepare for Christ’s Passion and Resurrection through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. But while we can prepare our hearts for the sorrow of Good Friday and the joy of Easter, personal grief doesn’t follow a liturgical calendar — it arrives unbidden. We don’t prepare our souls for it in advance because we don’t know when sorrow will come.
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This Lent, my family is grieving again, though differently. My father-in-law has been in and out of the hospital for months. We are hopeful for his health, but the news is always shifting — some days hopeful, other days uncertain. We wait. We hope. We trust.
Lent is a season of waiting too, a time of sorrow that anticipates redemption, but knowing there’s good in the end doesn’t always make that middle part easy.
I had just gotten married when my parents died, and this season — both Lent and this personal season of family grief — has made me reflect on how much my husband supported me all those years ago. I remember standing at my mother’s casket, my best friend beside me, telling me that she found consolation in knowing I had married the right person — someone who walked with me through my mother’s illness, her death, and the sorrow that she knew would follow. I often think of my friend’s wisdom now, as I strive to support my husband while he experiences the same heartache I did in our first years of marriage.
As members of the Church, we can sometimes think of Lent as a solitary season to work on ourselves — a kind of spiritual self-improvement plan. But that mindset leaves out something essential: Lent is not only about individual purification; it is about becoming more united with God and with one another. Our Church is communal. We are not meant to carry sorrow — or this Lenten season — alone. Catholicism teaches that faith is not just an individual journey but a shared experience of suffering and hope. The Eucharist itself — the heart of our faith — is a communal act. When we receive Holy Communion, we are not only drawing closer to God but also entering into deeper unity with the Body of Christ, spiritually and physically.
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Indeed, suffering of any kind is never borne alone. While my husband carries the weight of his father’s illness, it affects all of us in our family. He is often away — his father lives eight hours from us — but more than that, his heart is more fragile now, and so are all of ours. Grief has a way of stretching beyond the person most directly affected, rippling through a family, a marriage, a community.
On one of our nightly neighborhood walks, my husband recently said that he would do anything to trade places with his dad, to be the one who was sick and suffering. I didn’t respond at the time: I was too overcome with awe by his words. We walked in silence and said nothing for a while. Then, we sauntered home and took care of our nightly chores. I did the dishes. He took out the trash. I doubt my husband even remembers he said those words.
Yet I do, because my heart was so affected by his willingness to carry another’s burden — to suffer for love. This is the heart of Lent. It is Christ in Gethsemane, kneeling in the darkness, contemplating the suffering ahead yet choosing to bear it for others (Luke 22:42). It is Simon of Cyrene, pulled from the crowd to help carry the cross. It is the weight of love made visible in sacrifice: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
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Lent calls us to this kind of love — to be purified not for our own sake, but so that we may enter into deeper communion with God and with those we love. It reminds us that suffering, though painful, is never meant to be endured alone, not when we have each other on this Earth. Just as my husband has borne this season of sorrow over his father, and just as he once bore it with me, I pray now that I can be for him what he was for me — a steady presence, a quiet strength, a reflection of Christ’s self-giving love.
Because — actually — I was wrong at the start of this essay: Our Church calendars can and do help us prepare for the unexpected, so long as we are open to the fullness of their promises.
They are perhaps one of the few things we have in this life that can help us prepare not just for the sorrow of the cross, but for that full, wondrous, and communal love that makes resurrection possible, too.
