Perhaps you dread Christmas. When you are grieving, Christmas can be hard to face. My mother passed away just 10 days before Christmas Day in 2016, and that Christmas was awful. Our family had something really terrible happen on Christmas Day about 14 years ago or so. It is really not my story to tell, but here goes.
My youngest son, Joseph, and his girlfriend, Trisha, were living at our house. Trisha was pregnant, and we were all very excited. It was Christmas Day, we had opened presents, had our coffee, and we were getting ready to leave for my mother’s house. At that time, my mother was alive and we still had Christmas dinner at her house. But something was wrong. Trisha started passing blood. A lot of blood. This was unfathomable. She was 5 months along, how could this happen now? Joseph bundled Trisha into his car and took off for the hospital. We all followed.
It seemed like a very long time at the hospital before we were told what was going on. The doctor had informed Joseph and Trisha that their baby had no heartbeat. They were planning to induce her labor and she would deliver a child that would never draw breath. How can anyone endure such terrible pain? They were so young.
I don’t pretend to know what happened next. I just know that we waited and cried and prayed. Eventually, we were informed that we could come and be with Joseph and Trisha and their tiny daughter, Ava. We went into the delivery room, I remember it being lit dimly. I remember holding a baby so tiny, so fragile, so beautiful in my arms and something inside of me broke. I couldn’t think, I could barely breathe. She was so still. I don’t remember what I said to her. We all held her, all my children, my husband, Trisha’s family. We were trying to say hello and goodbye, that we would love her and that we will miss her and that we would mourn her forever. But that we would see her someday on the other side.
We had a service for Ava a few days later in the chapel at the cemetery. The tiny casket was white and it sat on a small altar with flowers on either side. Ava was buried in the children’s part of the cemetery, an isolated portion of the grounds by a small lake. It’s a heartbreaking place, covered with headstones with teddy bears and angels engraved by the names of those taken from grieving families. There are stuffed toys and colorful decorations by the markers. I used to decorate her grave a few times a year, along with my parent’s graves, until I had too much of it. Too much of death and cold headstones and the quiet, wind-blown cemetery. There were no voices there, no revelations.
Christmas. I love Christmas and what it means. Jesus took on human flesh so he could live among us and show us the nature of God. So he could die in my place for the sin in me that would keep me from eternity with God. This year, like so many others, the focus has to be on Jesus and gratitude and hope. Because God never leaves us, even though sometimes in our bewilderment we can’t feel His presence. He will never leave us, or stop loving us, and that’s the hope I cling to.
A Little Bit of Everything, With Love 