Six years ago, on an Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian liturgical calendar that marks the beginning of Lent, otherwise known as the 40 days prior to Easter, my family received its own kind of ashes in the news the doctor gave my Dad.

“Vascular dementia.” This is the diagnosis my Dad received that day to explain encroaching losses in his balance and energy and capacity. Slowly, over years, he had been having small strokes which had caused atrophy in his brain, shrinking of the brain tissue away from the skull. In the empty pockets, fluid started to build up which caused pressure against parts of his brain that control movement and balance. In a little over a year from that Ash Wednesday, he would die in an ICU after having a procedure to relieve the pressure in his brain in what he understood as the last, best option for regaining any quality of life as he would want to live it.

Ash Wednesday was not part of our lives together. I grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, a Christian tradition with an eschatology so deeply suspicious of Catholicism that anything that looked remotely Catholic, even a shared Christian liturgical calendar, could cause suspicion as a potential harbinger of the Antichrist. Once, my family attended a Methodist Christmas Eve service and as my Mom and I approached the Nicene Creed for the first time and saw the small ‘c’ “catholic” in the text we both looked at each other like, what do we do? Apparently, we made peace with its original intention because we continued to attend for years afterwards as the liturgical celebration of Christmas was something that nurtured us in a way that we needed beyond theological hair-splitting.

I wish I could remember the phone call with my parents that Ash Wednesday after they had returned from his doctor’s appointment. But all I remember is “Vascular Dementia” and then the phrase that came to me in the quiet of my own apartment after we hung up in tears: “From ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” If a diagnosis could mark ashes on our foreheads, then that moment did. We were living into Ash Wednesday even if we did not have it on our calendars. I did not say anything to anyone about it but in retrospect I wish I had. If it only look to my Mom again with those same searching eyes of what to do in the small ‘c’ catholic experience of a moment.

I have never received ashes on my forehead. But the meaning of those ashes rested on my heart that day: the reminder of our mortality, our helplessness to that fact. In the story of Jesus’ life, I have regularly found the most comfort not in the Easter portion of his life but in his grappling for comfort and strength as he faced his own death. He did not want to die. And he did not want to be alone as he faced it. He asked his friends to hold him in prayer because he did not feel his prayers alone could hold him. And his friends, bless them, were too tired to show up for him the way he needed them. There is comfort in that for me: See, here, how lonely and hard it is to be mortal. Even Jesus could not do it alone. But how lonely it can be all the same.

At the hospital where I work as an on call chaplain, I happened to be scheduled for the evening of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday morning. And I cannot help but think of my Dad today. The hospital is a place where the ashes of bad diagnoses and poor prognoses are regularly in the wind, landing where they will, reminding us that no one gets through life unscathed. On the morning of this Ash Wednesday, I can still feel the weight of a woman weeping against me in the hospital hallway as she learned her husband had not survived. This morning I am thinking of the countless people who will receive ashes today, both in symbolism and in truth.

When we find a way to place our faith in a story greater than our own, however we do that and by whatever Name, it can help us to face both life and death. The somber power of a ritual like Ash Wednesday can connect our individual story to something larger than itself. No one has ever been through something quite like what you have. And yet, there is a genre of story, a library of heartbreak, a syllabus of joy in which your unique experience belongs. If I could wish anything for everyone—and I am cautious about ever presuming to want anything for everyone beyond basic needs and civil liberties—it would maybe be that we could all know ourselves as part of something larger that can hold us when it is our time in the ashes, a mysterious and strong something against which we can fall apart, be scared, be bereft, be overwhelmed by the enormous and humbling effort it takes to be human.