I am constantly amazed at how swiftly time passes by; it always seems to catch me by surprise. I’ll turn around and someone who I remember as a baby is graduating from college or like when suddenly my son celebrated his 25th birthday. How is that possible, I ask myself, when I feel like I’m only just turning 30? Coming home and being around family always seems to put me into some weird time warp: I either stand still or regress a decade or two.
My sister-in-law’s father was stricken ill this morning. It wasn’t particularly life-threatening, but he had to be hospitalized. My sister-in-law and brother spent most of the day out of town spending time with her father as he underwent various medical tests and got situated in the hospital. Those of us who remained at home spent the day preparing the Christmas Eve dinner that is traditionally hosted here.
Today I was thinking back about Christmases past when people had been seriously ill during the holidays. I was about to tell my daughter about how my mother had been ill at Christmastime. We had been celebrating the holiday in Washington DC at my oldest sister’s house. Mom had been having difficulty breathing and my sister (who was an MD) after consulting with my father (who was also an MD) decided that she needed to get home to Indiana to see a doctor as quickly as possible. A few days later, she was diagnosed with the lung cancer that would take her life five short months later.
As I was telling Michal about this I found myself unexpectedly choked up with tears. How odd, I thought to myself, after all these years–19 since she was diagnosed–I can still be brought to tears. This too catches me off guard. Surely after 19 years I “should” be past this, and yet it is still poignantly present for me, especially being here in our hometown. Yesterday my sister and brother had gone to the cemetery to lay a wreath on my parents’ graves and place a new candle there. I haven’t been to my parents’ graves since we buried my father in 2010. I will probably go “visit” sometime while I’m still here in town, though I still find it difficult to go. For some reason I keep thinking about the words spoken by the angel to the women who came to visit Jesus’s tomb after he’d resurrected, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” To me, I don’t go to the cemetery to visit them, I am more comforted by thinking of them as being all around me rather than being at the gravesite. For others of my siblings, they derive great comfort from going to the cemetery, feeling the presence of both my parents there.
I am grateful for these holiday gatherings. We reminisce, we look at old pictures and smile and laugh at how cute we were or how funny we looked, and we introduce our grown children to a brief glimpse of who we were “back in the day.” These moments, poignant and comical are etched into the book of our lives, and even though some of the memories are painful, they remain deeply meaningful and irreplaceable. To be surrounded by well-loved nieces and nephews oohing and ahhing about cute I was as a six-year old, to laugh with my brothers and sister over some previously forgotten memory, to think longingly of those no longer present on the planet as well as those who were unable to travel to this year’s holiday gathering…for these things and many, many more, I am deeply and exceedingly grateful.
