Preparing for Love

In the Darkness, There is Light

To all my faithful readers and the new ones here: My dear Marine husband passed away on Monday December 9, 2024 of a massive stroke. Since I write my life, I want you to know that I’ll be all right. Death changes us, but for me, love pulls at me even more intensely.

In Advent, we sing about preparing the way. Like hairy old John the Baptist, we run through our personal deserts, mourning the loss of people we love, of things done and left undone, of the light that we so desperately need.

How fitting that we merge the darkest day of the year (December 22^nd) with the preparations for a savior. It’s when we can’t find a way to despair anymore, when tears are spent and the universe expands and grows cold that we are compelled to search for the light again.

As I wrote last post, my nadir came at age nine when Mom and Grammy visited me in the Crippled Children’s hospital, then left without me. The days between my joy of seeing them and my utter disappointment when they didn’t take me with them seemed eternal. I hated that Christmas in 1961.

The staff tried to make us patients feel normal. We made chains of red and green construction paper. We decorated a tree on the sunporch. We trudged through interminable worksheets and laughed at the kid in our Christmas pageant who kept singing, “BALD is the king of Israel.”

As the one-armed angel, my good arm was ready to stop working too. The teacher fastened my wings to my arms. I had to hold up one wing so I could look like a real angel—albeit a wounded one. I can still feel the poke of the tinsel halo on my head as we sang Silent Night.

And on the ward, we also had a nativity scene. Jensen, a nurse’s aide whom I hated, squinted her eyes right at me when she told us, “Don’t touch Baby Jesus.” She’d caught me moving the ox and the sheep around and removing the kings one day when I was bored out of my mind. I told her that the Three Kings weren’t supposed to be there yet, but she just sniffed.

I wasn’t the only girl on the ward who was sad—my friend Beatrice spoke mostly Spanish, but I could tell she was as homesick as I was. At night, I could hear her mumbling and sniffling. Because I was from Yuma, Arizona, I knew what she was saying: A bunch of stuff about hailing Santa Maria and El Senor and then Mama, Papi over and over.

A few days before Christmas, I was about to explode. I kept telling myself that Mom or Dad or Grammy was going to swoop in and rescue me before the big day. I knew it wouldn’t happen, but I couldn’t stop fantasizing. We had to make eclairs with the Grey Ladies (a kind of activity leader) and I got in trouble for smearing whipped cream on another girl’s nose. I figured I might as well be on the naughty list since Santa and God and everybody else ignored my pleas to go home right this minute.

But that night, I lay in my bed with my hand under my pillow, clutching my little white bible. I never cried, but I was about to break my own rule. That’s when I heard Beatrice.

She repeated all the same stuff about Mary and the good old Senor, but somehow it was different. Like her heart might die of homesickness. Like the light might go out of the world.

I slid off my bed and tiptoed to the sunporch. There, the whole Jesus family seemed so calm. The star at the top of the creche spoke to me, saying, “the light is coming. You’ll see.” Jensen echoed in my head. “Don’t touch the Baby Jesus.” I snatched it out of the manger and ran.

Standing at Beatrice’s bedside, I looked at her through her bedrails. I folded her fingers around Baby Jesus and smiled. Her eyes glistened with tears as she whispered, “gracias.”

¹

I jumped back into my bed. I was so much lighter now, despair scudding away like low clouds, I lay on my side, facing Beatrice. She was still doing her hails and Padre Nuestros, but she held onto that figurine like it could keep the world spinning. I think she was right.

If you believe, as I do, that love is what keeps the universe going, then you can prepare your heart the way that December 1961 prepared mine. I learned that even in the worst possible crappy situation, we can look for the light that’s on its way. Preparing our hearts for love, we can leave the darkness behind—if only for a moment.

That night in the crippled children’s hospital. I couldn’t stop staring at Baby Jesus. He nestled in Beatrice’s palm, but his arms reached out to me.

1. Beatrice is the taller girl alongside Ellen in 1961.