Saturday, The Seventh Day of Advent, 2011

Today's Scripture Reading is

First Saturday of Advent (Isaiah 21:6-12)

Isaiah's prophecy foretells the coming of Christ, and of His triumph over sin. In the reading for the first Saturday of Advent, Babylon, the symbol of sin and idolatry, has fallen. Like the watchman, in this Advent we wait for the triumph of the Lord.

Below is a re-post of an entry from 1/29/2011.  It has been speaking to my heart lately because my daughter and her husband lost their baby boy 13 months ago.  Robbie's funeral was Saturday, December 18, 2010.  It was one week before Christmas, our family traveled to East Hanover, NJ to Gate of Heaven cemetary where my dad is buried.  This was such a sad sad time for our family -- beginning with Stacey's heartbreaking phone call on 11/14 telling me that they had lost their baby, everything that followed, and then months later, having Stacey and her husband and their two little girls experience the same heartbreak all over again when late in her pregnancy a second baby boy was lost.
As I share about Advent this year, I find myself thanking the Lord a multitude of times each day for the fact that the sadness that enveloped our family last year, feels as if it has lifted.  Last year, I went through all the motions, and I thought I did everything that I was supposed to do for the holiday season.  Granted, we did ALL of our Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, but there are folks who do that normally anyway, right? 
I told myself that as long as everything was accomplished, well, that meant I felt fine and we were all okay.  Boy, was I ever wrong!  While I did indeed go through the motions, I can stand here one year later and state that I was so 'absent' from the Holiday Spirit that it now astounds me. 
Sadness is indeed an emotion, but grief is a process.  The grieving process has no timetable, no benchmarks that one can try to reach by a certain date...it is unique to each individual and a journey like no other.
I remarked to my husband that this year I have very specific, definite activities/events that have been placed on my 'must' list.  Mariano, the kids and I have prepared homemade vanilla extract to give as gifts.  We have sterilized the bottles, I've had labels printed, and a ton (well, maybe not really a ton) of Madagascar Vanilla Beans have been sitting in very expensive Imperia Vodka since October making what we hope will be amazing pure vanilla extract that will be ready to use by 2/2012.  I am pretty sure that this time last year I couldn't even spell 'vanilla' I was so preoccupied -- and, as for the vodka, well it would have made ALOT of screwdrivers.
I'm knitting a blanket for my grand daughter, I've purchased gifts, the tree is almost up, we have fun things planned as a family and things planned for just me and the kids, I have a definite plan for decorating outside (all in blue in loving memory of Jack Donaldson who was just one of the most amazing children anyone could have known -- pls visit his mom's blog:  www.aninchofgray.blogspot.com), and tons of other things.  I think it has taken me this long to get here to this point where I say that not only am I doing these things, I am doing them and I feel joy in my heart.  THAT is my Christmas gift this year -- this joy placed by the Lord in my heart. 

Below is what I wrote 11 months ago here.  Tomorrow, I will get back to the Advent devotions -- but, the post below came to my mind tonight sitting at Mass and thinking about Mary and how she must have felt when her son was crucified, and with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception coming this week, I thought I would share my thoughts from earlier this year.

My daughter shared this quote with me from C.S. Lewis when this past November, she and her husband lost their baby boy late in her pregnancy: “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…there is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape…not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.”
My daughter, my sister and I noticed when we were at the cemetary at my grandson Robbie's funeral that the gravesite next to my dad and Robbie's was totally decorated for Christmas (Robbie's funeral was a week before Christmas). We were looking at the teddy bears and ornaments and we noticed the date on the gravestone -- the little girl, her name was Gabriella, had died when she was 11 months old in 1960. The three of us were silent and then my sister commented to my daughter that it's obvious that families do not 'get over' the death of their children......here we were 50 years later and family members were making sure that Gabriella's grave was decorated for Christmas. As we walked around the children's section of this very large cemetary (my dad's gravesite is at the edge of the 'baby' section) most if not all of the gravesites were decorated with tiny Christmas trees or teddy bears, or toys. We looked at dates on gravestones and continued to notice and comment that 20, 30, 40, 50+ years later, so many children are remembered with love.