Since I wasn’t raised in a liturgical church, I’m still learning about the traditions and seasons and heck, even the funny names the Episcopal church gives everything. At this very tired point, we’re slouching toward Bethlehem with the beginning of Advent.
In my family, the weeks before Christmas have always been more about decorating, shopping, more shopping, wrapping until you ran out of tape, acting surprised because you were awful and snooped. Typical middle-class stuff.
But when I was nine, the holidays didn’t start off like that, and certainly didn’t wind up that way. In October of that year, I’d been sent from Yuma, AZ to Salt Lake City, Utah to a hospital for crippled children. I was all by myself save for the King James Bible with my name stamped in gold and my ugly saddle oxford shoes.
The hospital was going for equanimity but ended up making all the patients miserable. Since it was a charity hospital, we couldn’t wear our clothes from home, nor keep any favorite toys. The Ladies Auxiliary sewed all the clothing, so we chose ugly outfits from a cart on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Imagine girls in plaster casts wearing somebody’s hideous kitchen curtains and you’d be about right.
With my two allowed books (one Nancy Drew mystery, one KJV bible), stationery and those icky shoes, I tried hard to stay me. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t lose myself.
Every day, I belted out all my favorite songs: The Purple-People-Eater, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Elvis crooning Are You Lonely Tonight (yes!). I wrote to my friends and got a blank theme book and started my first novel. I kept my little white bible under my pillow and tried to say the magic words that would send me home. I never figured them out.
We went to hospital school unless we were just out of surgery and still throwing up. Weeks later, it was Halloween, which turned out to be three nurses dressed up like witches and a ghost and a little cup of candy corn. I dreamed about all the loot my friends in Yuma must have hauled in. If God wasn’t going to tell me how to get home, I vowed to bust out of the hospital the first chance I had.
But before I knew it, Thanksgiving came around. I’d had my operation and was stuck in an arm splint. They never released anybody who still had a cast or splint. I resigned to my fate, telling anyone who’d listen all about my gramma from Kentucky and her wonderful cooking.
Thanksgiving was worse than Halloween—no costumes and no candy, just cold mashed potatoes and terrible pumpkin pie.
By December, I only had one chance left. Surely, they’d send me home for Christmas. After three months, the only visitors I had were a couple of old people who knew my gramma. They were strangers, but it felt oddly comforting to have a visitor. I may have smirked ungraciously at the girl in the next bed over, who just sat on her bed looking bored.
And then Mom’s letter arrived.
Mom was a secretary, so all her letters were typed in red—sorta like Jesus but without the thees and thous. She asked what I wanted for Christmas. A Madame Alexander collector’s doll, of course. My pulse raced. It was a clue! Mom was telling me--in code--that I’d be home by Christmas. I practically levitated.
Then, as the holiday neared, who should show up but Mom and Grammy. They’d come to finally spring me from this place. Santa wouldn’t have to reroute to find me after all. They came every day for three whole days, Mom playing piano as we practiced our Christmas pageant and Grams conducting since she was a music teacher. If someone cut off the heavy splint on my arm, I’d probably be able to fly, I was so happy.
The next day, they both left. Without me. That night was darker than any I’d ever known.
I ended up staying until late January. But my first trip to the crippled children’s hospital feels a lot like Advent to me. Today, my husband will find out if the doctors can make his heart work better. He’s been on dialysis ten years and his poor ticker is down to 20-30%. It’s pretty iffy.
So yes, like the song we sing at Advent of signs of endings all around us, I’m feeling the same as I did long ago as a nine-year-old stuck far from home. My heart is practically hibernating. I still don’t know any magic words to make things better, but maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe Advent is all about taking your greatest heartaches and presenting them to the darkness. If we’re brave enough to hold up our very hearts as we face these unlit paths, we can somehow feel our way toward the light again.
On Christmas 1961, I couldn’t cry. And now, as my husband fights for his life, I refuse to cry. Instead, I thrust my good arm up into the black hole of despair and defeat and say, “Here, take it all.” Only then do I squint into the distance as a tiny ray of love pierces the night.
Somehow, it’s enough to get me to the next morning and the one after that. Advent tells us to keep standing up to darkness, even if you don’t know the right words, even if you doubt your own heart. I guess it’s true, it’s how the light gets in.
When I was a young, single woman and pediatric nurse, I would bring my guitar into work on all the holidays I worked. I would go from room to room for any of the bed bound children and sing to and with them. My heart ached for the children not able to be home, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. My heart aches for the little girl hoping to be home for the holidays and for the woman you are today, waiting hopeful and yet aching as you care for your husband right now.
You are so wonderfully candid and personal. We are also new to the liturgy (narthex is the funniest word to me) but find great comfort in it. I wish you peace and comfort.