June 3, 2026 // Columns

In the Absence Of

Molly Jo Rose

I often wake up thick in the dream fog of my parents still being alive. The confusion of it is difficult to shake as the vividness of morning dreams is particularly visceral. It makes the grief of these moments palpable with my mom’s smell lingering in my nose and my dad’s laugh resonating in my ears. In these moments, the absence of my parents activates all my senses. The air is pungent. My skin slows. Everything is heavy. As sleep rolls off me and my waking life returns, the grief recedes and takes its place as the background noise of my life. But on the nights I dream of them, that hiding grief jumps to the surface again as a refresher of loss and the life we shared.

Curiously, absence of all kinds deepens the experience of life. My children are several years out of puddle jumpers, but I remember the joy of the days they were released from them. With one click, their slick arms slid out, and their slippery bodies knifed through the water with a ruckus of laughter and splashing. For the first time, nothing was between their skin and the lush wetness of the pool. No barrier stopped them from flips and kicks and full immersion. In the absence of the puddle jumper, their happy bodies experienced the full joy of swimming.

Already, I anticipate the absence of the smell of my children when they come in from playing outside. I worry I will be an old lady stalking neighborhood kids to smell the intoxicating earthiness born from days climbing sap-laden trees and cartwheeling through soft summer grass. It is the absence of this smell that makes winter feel so much longer. What I am feeling in these moments is the peculiar power of absence to electrify and wake our senses to the fullness of life. Because I so painfully and deliciously understand absence, I can imagine how hollowed out the apostles must have felt after Jesus died.

It’s useful, I think, to consider the human realities of the Upper Room for the apostles. The hypostatic union of Jesus must have been even more impossible to accept in person. In Luke 24:36-49, Jesus appeared suddenly behind the doors His disciples had locked. Their friend was dead, but then there He was standing in front of them. Even as they believed Him to be the Son of God, they also knew Him as a man whose smell was familiar to them, whose gait they would recognize from a distance, and whose laugh their ears still held memories of. The apostles watched Him die, but impossibly, He appeared in the Upper Room and ate fish alongside them. How profound that momentary recovery of their friend must have been and with what renewed pain His departure at Bethany must have been felt.

But maybe the apostles needed that. Maybe they needed to be brought more fully into the absence of Jesus to understand how much He meant to them and to the world. Maybe they needed their senses to crackle once again with the loss to prepare them for the task of evangelization.

While our Church calendar regularly renews us in the birth, death, and new life of Christ, it is often difficult to feel the absence in our bones the way the apostles must have that day. In the dailiness of life, we forget we are all living in the shadow of this death. But more importantly, we are living in the shadow of the life this gained for us. Perhaps this is the purpose of all our “In the Absence Of” moments. Just as in the Upper Room, we need a reminder of His absence, but also a promise of what His departure made possible.

Like grief, the promise of heaven lives in the background noise of my life, but I have a thousand moments of absence that remind me I am not yet living the life that is meant for me. Absence doesn’t just make our hearts grow fonder. It is an echo chamber of longing for the life God has planned for us, one the brilliance of our senses only offers shadow reflections of.

In the painful waking reminder of someone I love being gone, in the inevitable removal of guardrails for my children as they grow, even in the way I can’t quite remember their summer smell in winter, absence tells me I am meant for more. The Upper Room is where that more starts, and the more I lean into the pain and joy of the absences of my life, the more fully I anticipate the life that is coming next.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.