Pooky’s triumph

Like a struggling butterfly, my grief will emerge into something beautiful and new.

By Bethel B. Crockett, parishioner Reformation Lutheran Church

My mother, Marguerite Bretscher, died suddenly on July 4, 1998, at an airport as she and my father were returning home from vacation. Just 16 hours earlier she'd called to tell me of my niece's birth — her 22nd grandchild. When our conversation ended, I didn't know that I had told my mother goodbye for the last time.

The months following her death were filled with disbelief, emptiness and utter despair. Despite my upbringing in a Lutheran parsonage, I found that I desperately needed repeated reassurances of God's love and promises. As the Easter following my mother's death approached, I yearned for a visible metaphor of resurrection.

During Lent, our Sunday school youth raise mail-order caterpillars that are timed to enter into the chrysalis stage and emerge as butterflies for an Easter morning release. Maybe I should join them? Our family had released butterflies at my mother's burial service. So I brought home three caterpillars and named two of them Dot and Mildred in memory of my great-aunts. The third one I called by my mother's nickname, "Pooky."

On Holy Saturday morning, my children discovered Mildred, now a butterfly, hanging beside her chrysalis. Later that day we watched in awe as a newly created Dot appeared. By Easter morning we could see Pooky's orange and black wings within a transparent membrane breaking through her chrysalis. We hoped she would emerge soon so we could release her with Dot and Mildred in the Sunday school butterfly ceremony.

But on the long ride to church, traumatized perhaps by the moving car, Pooky violently trembled and struggled to break free. During Sunday school she became very still, and the chrysalis that entombed her blackened. She remained motionless as we drove home after church, quite in contrast to the way she had writhed on the trip earlier that morning. It weighed on me that the reassurance I so desperately sought was not forthcoming.

That afternoon, as we drove our two children back to college, I couldn't stop thinking about the dark, motionless chrysalis. "It's only a caterpillar. It doesn't matter that its name is Pooky," I told myself. "There will always be other caterpillars that you can name Pooky. Just pretend Dot or Mildred was Pooky. What difference does it make? It doesn't change anything."

Still, despair overwhelmed me on the ride home. "I killed this butterfly," I thought. "Why did I take it to church and upset it with the car ride? Whatever made me think it was a good idea to name it Pooky anyway?"

And then, "Why did God have to do this to me this Easter? Doesn't God understand what I'm going through right now? Couldn't God take care of one stupid little butterfly?"

I decided that in the morning I would take the chrysalis into the woods and leave it. Perhaps the butterfly was still alive and would emerge? I would never know, but I could always cling to that hope.

That evening I was reluctant to look in the butterfly cage, but some movement caught my eye. There sat a butterfly, triumphantly fanning her wings.

Instantly I was struck by more than just the butterfly. Pooky was perched over her empty chrysalis, which was split open and withering. Under the chrysalis were red bloodlike stains of waste material from the hatching. Yet above these signs of death and struggle--a living butterfly!

That image remains a powerful metaphor, reassuring and resurrecting in its own right: the suffering, the pain, the hopelessness, the empty tomb, the exhilarating joy, the new and glorious life. I began to see my grief as the traumatized struggling butterfly in the hands of a loving, merciful Father. I learned to trust that in God's time something beautiful and new would emerge even in the face of my weakness, tears, pain and hopelessness. I, too, would live again, now and forever.

The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! (And so has Pooky.)

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