Lent and Spring and Seasons

It is spring and with it comes the waiting, the wondering, the remembering.

How is it that a body prepares itself for a grief that happens time and time again?

It is also the lenten season, and with it comes a period of 40 days in the desert, of holding our breath.

Each year I welcome spring with eagerness, as crocuses appear and delicate lilies of the valley sprout. And each year, I forget and remember what the season is about to spring upon me.

Grace.

I appear in church on Wednesday nights in the spring, and in our church we honor lent with Holden Evening Prayer. It is a service of vespers, of chanting, of praying, of psalms.

And each year, one of Grace's funeral songs is sung. And each year I forget and am blindsided by that grief rising again. Of funerals. Of remembering. Of sadness.

This year, the song appeared early in lent. So I thought tonight, I'd be safe to return. The song passed. What else could possibly blindside me?

And tonight, blindsided again, by a sermon about Mary at the foot of the cross and the pastor spoke about parents who experience the death of a child. He spoke about 'those parents' in a third person kind of a way, a way that I'm sure wasn't meant to be impersonal, but how can it be anything else but that when you are the parent sitting in the pew and realizing, "Oh, that's me; I am one of those parents." And the pastor is speaking from the pulpit, protected from the grief of ever knowing what it is like to be childless, with his own children sitting there?

I am like Mary without her child.

I am one of those parents that has to be dealt with.

I am a childless mother with some of my children present. Some not all.

It is spring and as March draws nigh, and April showers greet us, my body gets tense; my muscles grow tighter, and I begin to hold my breath in a way that I do every season.

I am in a period of waiting. I am 40 days in the desert. I am slouching toward Bethlehem to find myself at the foot of an empty manger.

There is April, and then there is May, and with it comes the rush of emotions, the undulating pulse of the memories, rising again and again.

Recently, a friend posted a video news clip about the children in Japan being swept away by the tsunami. The children. More of them than one can keep inside of a head.

It is a frightening number of children still missing. And yet, each child, is just one child of one parent; each one should be individually remembered and mourned, but how can an entire nation mourn just one when there are so many?

One child is enough grief to last an entire lifetime.

Where to you place the grief of an entire town of children?

Sometimes, I am blindsided by my own grief. I don't pretend not to be.

I live my life fully present in the moment, while all at once remembering the past and looking forward to the future.

It is spring and with it comes the waiting, the wondering, the remembering.

How is it that a body prepares itself for a grief that happens time and time again?