The Terrifying Beauty of Blood and Tears

Reconciling Grief and Faith in the Face of Tragedy

The cold concrete basement floor at the bottom of the stairs was stained from a shallow bloody pool, and remained years later. Its sanguine dimensions appeared when Ebba was pushed down the stairs during a botched robbery.

Two men left with a couple hundred dollars, an electric typewriter, and a cheap boom box. Ebba was a tiny lady in her 80s, too frail to lift a box of a hundred envelopes. I imagine she said something that pissed the robbers off enough they kicked her down the winding stairs. She hit the oak tread of the turn step, breaking it, before resting lifelessly on the floor. Her blood filled the pool.

While my pregnant mother cleaned the blood, The karate studio next door was running class. We heard the drills, the stomping, and the “hi-yahs.” Mom wept, then screamed, “why couldn’t you fucking stupid karate idiots save Ebba? Shut the fuck up!”

I was seven and confused. I found a rag and helped Mom clean it. I watched as one of her tears landed in the blood, and a tiny circular wake spread slowly to the pool’s edge.

Ebba died two days later in the hospital.

Dad said, “Death by defenestration! We deserve justice”. For a self-described pacifist who derived pride from following Christ, it seemed strange a head-first drop down two flights of stairs was suitable justice for murdering Ebba. Still, when he declared a punishment in multisyllabic words, we all knew to listen. Those words landed like a well-placed oar: plopping and circling, its wake spanning to death’s edge.

At mass, I wondered if the priest could understand Mom’s tears.

Could he feel her pain? No.

Understand her power to create and sustain life?

To him, sitting on his throne, hoping that blood could be more than just wine.

While Mom knelt in prayer, I stared at the dried blood under her fingernails. I saw the tear lines streaking her face. My heart exploded in knowing that the point of living in Christ was doing the job no one else wanted.