The Season of Waiting & Worrying
The first lockdown in Manitoba happened right in the middle of Lent and the Easter season. It’s as if God declared, ‘Let me make this a little more obvious for people.’ Advent, the season of lighting the way to the Christmas season, involves lighting a candle for four Sundays while we wait in ‘joyful hope.’
Joyful hope.
Tough one.
On December 24 last year, I saw news stories about a virus inflicting cities like Wuhan in China before switching to the Midnight mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. (We Catholics love mouthfuls!) Dad was in bed watching Family Feud reruns on the bedroom TV. We said nothing about losing mom three months before.
I cried my way through the mass. The season of birth, the time of joy, and the absence of mom sat in the living with the empty chair she normally occupied as we watched TV together from time to time. Dad didn’t hear me over the volume as Steven Harvey cried out, ‘Survey says!’ New Year’s Eve rolled around to file away 2019, 2020 waited with rubbing hands, saying ‘wait till they get a load of me’ like Jack Nicolson’s joker.
Mom’s death was surprising with her illness's speed, the time between diagnosis and death, and her ten-year gap between her and dad. “I am older,” he once told her cousin, “I am supposed to go first.’ Pretty soon, everything that’s supposed to happen for everyone smashed to pieces throughout the world: weddings, funerals, work, expectations for new jobs, homes.
Everything.
It makes trying to write a reflection hard. I stopped reaching for the profound now; I simply reach for the next day, then the next one and then the one after that. It’s like lighting a lantern to light my way. It’s not the peppy message preached by people like Leon Fontaine from Springs Church or others like him. It’s honest, and it’s the truth.
A wreath hangs on my door and a matching wreath, a doorknob decoration, says ‘Welcome.’ I wrote some Christmas cards, the one things I deliberately over-purchase every year. (Good thing since they’re considered a non-essential item under the new public health directives.) Small things to stave off the personal darkness, the feeling of hopelessness. For me, the overwhelming sadness that comes with grief knowing when my parents died, being a daughter, died with them. Advent is the season of waiting, and I am waiting to see what emerges from my life and from the wreckage of this moment in time.
