Advent 3.2: For you

First we were waiting for you to get better.

Then we were waiting for you to die.

From the first Sunday of Advent to the third, everything changed.

And you did die. Quietly. By yourself. As December 18, 2013 slipped in, you slipped out.

That was almost the biggest oddity and irony, I felt, of the whole three weeks of waiting: you were quiet. You couldn't speak anymore, or joke, or sing, or snap if someone was blocking your view of the football game. The only rumbles now came from the deep recesses of your chest and lungs, mouth open, swallow reflex gone, bacteria seeping in.

If you had to die, couldn't you at least have been allowed to be yourself until the end?

We tried to be boisterous for you. That's always been easy for us, thanks to you, in good times and bad. Singing and laughing and surrounding your bed. I hope you understood, as you flickered in and out, the truth and the hope and the beauty of what you'd created in your 86 years, the legacy you left on this earth. Not just those of us in the room that last weekend, but the countless others whose lives you touched with your generosity, your humor, your faith, and your humility.

I don't believe God plans bad things to happen or when they happen, but I do believe God is with us through them. And it somehow seemed hauntingly, devastatingly appropriate that you died one week before Christmas Day. I never asked you if December 25 was your favorite day of the year, but through a granddaughter's eyes, it sure seemed like it. And that made it my favorite day, too.

Besides your cheery scrawling letters and memories of your voice, the greatest gift I have of yours is the green embroidered stool that was your throne on Christmas morning. I hope someday we will use it again, a new generation of parents and grandparents pulling gift after gift from under the tree and watching the joyful faces of children as they rip open the paper. And I hope that they will realize that the presents don't matter half as much as the love behind them, the significance of family gathered together, the laughter and fellowship that will give the gift of memories for decades beyond.

Tonight after work we will visit your grave on the sloping hill in the chilly rain, weather that mirrors the day we buried you. We will think not of the three weeks of waiting before you bowed out of the spotlight, but of the 86 years that shone before. Your sons will most likely imitate your most famous family lines, your daughter will probably hum one or two of your favorite hymns.

I will think about how four years, 1,460 days, feels like both a snap and an everlasting sea.

Always waiting for you.

Advent 3.1: Give me the waiting music

On this busy Advent Sunday, here's another poem from 2011.

Bleak midwinter music
shivers me into expectancy;
of course, I pep up, pink-cheeked
when I hear "you better not
shout," or full-blown fa la las,
but during these
waiting days,
give me "let all mortal flesh keep
silence." give me
its minor key and mystery,
set before me the fresh
solemn snow that I see within its
harmonies: bated-breath silence
slipping between each beckoning
word, Christ our God to earth
descendeth...
Within that promise, bleak midwinter shines.
Give me the waiting music,
the might and melt and mysticism of a
bobbing star.

Advent 2.7: Loop

Tonight my dad and I decorated my parents' Christmas tree (we're taking a tree break at our house this year on account of the new-ish canine) and then my mom and I ate soup and grilled cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table while the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas sauntered along in the background.

I cherish the chance to live close to my parents as an adult, the lovely feeling of unwrapping familiar ornaments with Dad, remembering the past but not dripping with nostalgia, because though the chapter of childhood has closed, a new one has opened, and it's just as meaningful. Sitting at the kitchen table where I came down to start high school days with so many questions and nerves and wonderings about how life would turn out--and now, it's far from fully turned out, but parts of life have begun to reveal themselves more than they had at 16. And now I experience waiting and curiosity about new things, new hopes and concerns blossom with every sunrise, once again unpacking them at the same table with my mother.

Maybe life is a series of Advents: expectation after expectation, fulfillment after fulfillment--with plenty that don't wrap up in a neat and tidy package. Expectation and failure, expectation and uncertainty, expectation that expects the worst. We're almost always in the throes of some waiting period no matter where we are, often only able to find out the answer if we live into it, the feedback loop of daily mundane life somehow starting to add up to deep, soul-mattering stuff.

When Advent arrives, we recognize it. We yearn for it. Because truly, we're always within it. The waiting. And we need a reminder, in the cold and darkness (the perfect time for this season to exist), that no matter what we're waiting on, a resolution will arrive. Fulfillment will set itself loose in the air. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

And while we're waiting, we pray for a sturdy table where we can talk it over, surrounded by kindreds who are always part of our answer, no matter what reveals itself in time.