To be carried: On living in Holy Saturday

by Nancy Hakizimana –

April is the month that holds so much for me. My father was born on the seventh, I followed on the twelfth, five days later, and for years we shared the month. He would have turned 61 this year, but Covid took him before he could, and his absence has added an extra weight to a month that was already full. Because April is also the month I entered this world, 32 years ago, in Rwanda, Kigali, in the middle of a genocide. And it is when Easter often falls, the season where, for Christians, death and new life are held together. So, April has always asked me to celebrate and mourn at the same time; I have never known it any other way.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be carried. When I was little, I didn’t need to say much. I would tug on my father’s arm, and he would lift me, easily and without hesitation, onto his shoulders. From up there, the world felt more open, and I felt safe. That is who he was, a strong man, with a particular softness for his daughters. He showed up for everything: school events, sports days, poetry recitals, dance shows, and the long, patient hours when I was learning to drive. Even when work took him across the world, somehow, he was still present. He had a way of making you feel held without ever needing to say it out loud. Love, I understood early, felt like being carried without having to ask. Even now, even in death, he carries me. The life I live, as a self-funded PhD candidate in Europe, is built on what he left behind: his labour, his love. Sometimes I feel he is still arranging things for me from wherever he is.

As a Catholic, Easter has always been the season that makes the most sense to me. Paschal mystery: the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. Death and new life sit side by side. The reassurance that something can begin again, even when everything suggests otherwise. As a child, I did not always understand why the liturgy of Easter moved me so deeply. But now I think it is because I was born inside it.  I was born six days into a genocide I should have never survived during the very season that proclaims God’s impossible love.

You do not need to be religious to understand what this season points toward. Most of us, at some point, find ourselves in a period where the outcome is unclear and where we are asked to keep going anyway. In a world that feels plagued with war and grief, Easter is simply the oldest insistence that love outlasts loss. That the stone does not have to be the end. Whatever your faith, most of us know what it is to sit in the dark and wait for something to shift.

That waiting has a name in Easter tradition. It is called Holy Saturday, not Good Friday, with its rupture, and not Easter Sunday, with its clarity. Holy Saturday is the in-between, the day when those who loved Jesus did not know that Sunday was coming. The day of faith without evidence, of sitting with the stone still in place and not knowing whether anything will move it.

I have spent much of my PhD living in Holy Saturday. Self-funded, navigating institutions as a Black woman that were not built with me in mind, the future not quite clear, the stone not quite moving, and yet, I have never once felt abandoned. Because being carried does not require knowing where you are going, it only requires trusting the arms holding you.

Now, as I enter my 32nd year, I have been sitting with what this age actually means. In Christian imagination, 33 carries weight as the age of Jesus’s crucifixion. But at 32, Jesus was still walking on the dusty road toward something he could not outrun. This is where I am, I am still walking toward something I can feel but cannot yet name, with nothing in my hands but faith. There is something about that which feels exactly right. I am not supposed to have arrived; I am supposed to be on the road. And so, still in formation, I find myself like Mary in John 11:32, falling to my knees and saying: Lord, I do not understand. But I am here, I am still here.

When my father lifted me onto his shoulders as a child, he was, without knowing it, teaching me something about faith. That being carried does not mean the road disappears; it means you do not have to walk it alone. My Catholic faith calls this the communion of saints, the belief that those who have died remain in relationship with us, that love does not end at the grave. But you do not need that language to know the feeling. The feeling of certainty that someone gone is still, somehow, with you.

This Easter, as the world moves through its own season of uncertainty, I return to the simplest thing I know. Love is stronger than death. My father carried me through my whole life and continues to carry me in death. And now, as I enter my 32nd year, in this Holy Saturday of a life, I am choosing to let April, with everything it holds, carry me.

Happy Easter. Happy Birthday, Dad.

Nancy Hakizimana is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.