Did you know?
No parent is supposed to bury their child.
Mary stood at that cross for hours. Not for a moment, not glancing away for hours, watching her son suffocate slowly in public execution, surrounded by people who came to watch. The Gospels don't soften it, and they don't explain her pain. They just say she was there.
She'd been warned. Thirty years earlier, when Jesus was still a newborn in her arms, a man named Simeon looked at her and said a sword would pierce her own soul. Not metaphorically. She carried that sentence for three decades, never knowing when it would land, until this exact afternoon.
Even dying, Jesus used his last breaths to make sure she wouldn't be left alone.
Then the part no parent recovers from. The body taken down. Wrapped. Carried. Sealed behind a stone, in a tomb that wasn't even his borrowed, because there wasn't time to build one of his own.
A mother, walking away from a sealed grave, leaving her child behind in the ground.
There is no version of that walk that doesn't break something in a person.