I spent a lot of yesterday, just feeling the weight of twelve years minus my dad. In truth, it was longer than that, because Alzheimers started stealing him away over the years before, but I hold tight to the memories of when he broke through the disease. They stand like defiant rocks of truth against the hard eroding ocean of force the loss of memory brings.
The big ones that linger, when I attended my goddaughter’s baptism, the next day we went to mass. We were at a strange church for him and for me, and yet after communion, he turned from the line, having just received, and saw me in line. His face broke into a smile that said, “I know your face.” and I can summon his smile in that moment. It was a grace given, that I happened to look when he looked, and I knew what his look meant in that instant.
It echoes a moment with my grandmother who also suffered from this scourge of a condition. When we would put on “My Fair Lady,” she would sit up taller (than 4’10” allowed), and if she couldn’t sing along, her body moved in her chair to the music she’d known from when it played on Broadway originally.
Likewise, when someone would bring her communion –long after she’d stopped speaking, she would bow her head and put out her tongue to receive. Other foods required coaxing and reminders and watching, but she remembered the Eucharist when everything else fell away.
It struck me then and still now, as she lay bound in her bed, one leg amputated, as a non verbal, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” when she received. It also reminded me of the joke we’d made early in her enduring of this condition, “Every day, you meet new people, go new places, learn new things.” we said as a way of laughing off the tragedy she’d have to stare down. Every day for her, was a first communion.
As we plod through the Lent of this life, we must remember what is most important, is not if we went to Harvard (Dad did), or weathered trials well (Coco did), but how we responded to the cross given in the moment given. That response, like the stare across the church, like the sitting up to the music, reveals our core joys, values, essesence. How we respond to suffering, reveals us.
In this day and age, when we are barraged with bad news and difficulty, learning how to not give into despair, isolation, or willful ignorance, is an act of faith. We are plodding forward irrespective of policies, procedures, abuses, problems, corruption, deception, any of it. We walk on, and we hold onto our crosses, knowing they are the means by which we illustrate not only our faith, but also our love of a suffering God who offers salvation by the cross, through the cross, and from His cross. Holding on is a form of defiant hope in our triumphant Lord.
Today is March 6, and there are twenty-nine days until Easter. Let us hold fast by, through and from.
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