As the days turned into weeks, I felt the intensity of relationship beginning to slip and I began to fear that the changes I had only recently embraced would fade away and I would return to my former self and again be lost in world created by my will that I did not want to acknowledge.
I attended mass with my wife on the second Sunday of Advent. Kneeling down after entering the pew at the Cathedral for mass, I began to pray,
“Dear God, please help me find a way to reconnect with you. I feel that I have lost some of the fire I had coming out of the Cursillo and I want to rekindle the fire. Thank you for keeping me sober yesterday and help me to stay sober for today. Please help my brothers and sisters who suffer from addiction find that it is Your Will that they walk down the road of recovery. Amen” My heart began to pound so loudly I was certain that those around me could hear it as clearly as the bells of the Cathedral. I was unable to focus what else to say so I just spent a few more minutes trying to quiet my heart and focus my thoughts.
I sat back on the pew and looked up at stained glass windows and watched as they were lit up or shadowed as fast moving clouds passed by the sun. The day was December 7, Pearl Harbor day, a day with significance to all Americans and many more people around the world. It is day that invokes memories of sadness and changed destinies. For me, December 7, Pearl Harbor Day is also a day of ultimate significance I was born 10 years after the war. The memories of events that occurred on December 7 have nothing to do war and are intensely personal to me, and are shared only my wife. Or so I thought.
The memories of the December 7 that have shadowed my life began when I was sitting in my recliner sipping an after work cocktail of whiskey on the rocks waiting for my pregnant wife to come home from a routine visit to her doctor. When she came through the door it became instantly, sickeningly clear disaster had struck. The baby, our first, was gone from us before we both could know him. We had tried so long and so hard to conceive that hopes were ebbing away when we suddenly found she become pregnant. The moment the presence of a new life growing within her was the greatest moment of joy I had experienced up that point in my life. When the time was right, I had felt the baby quicken in the womb but then as the days progressed along, the novelty of feeling his movement passed. I took for granted that there would be no end to the days in this world when I could engage him in some way. Had it been one day, two days, or a week? I could not remember then nor can I remember now. I thought that because God knew all that we had to endure to get the spark of life started would mean that the spark would ignite and burn forever. Surely this baby was the answer to our prayers, a real manifestation of God’s will for us.
Before the evening of that December 7 passed, I took poured another drink and probably poured even more after that. Those drinks may have been the first drinks taken not for enjoyment or fun but to numb scorched emotions. I don’t know that I drank much over the next days as we went through the horror of having to wait out the delivery of a dead baby but instead of engaging with God and my wife to come to understanding of the depth of grief and the beauty of healing, I pushed the hurt deep inside and tried to wall it off.
When the time came for the baby to be delivered, I was not in the room but came back shortly afterwards. I took the still, dark, little form, wrapped in a receiving blanket into my arms. Trying to find some solace in a moment that I did not think could be endured, I thought of John the Baptist. I said, “As your father, I name you John in honor of John the Baptist. He came to prepare the way for another.” I wet my thumb in the tears of both his mother and myself and said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
In time, we gave his body over to the staff of the hospital and left that dark place to walk into a future we could not predict. There is no answer to the question why babies die even if there is answer as to what happened to them. For us, for John, there was never an answer as to what happened that could be communicated to me within the realm of human understanding.
Our time is visible to us and we can see each day pass into the next but suddenly the passage of time from that day so many years ago until that day in the cathedral collapsed into one single image that was no longer colored by sadness but was filled of chaotic impressions of welcoming hope.
Still struggling to focus my thoughts, I opened the liturgy guide and found that the gospel was about John the Baptist. I was immediately transported back to that moment so many years ago when we held, loved and blessed a child lost to us before he could know life. I did the math in my head and realized that 25 years had passed from the day my wife came into the house with news that changed us forever.
I asked to be reconnected and He chose to take me back to the day when I took the burden of grief into myself instead of asking Him to share it with me. I came to know, to really understand that it was not his will that my son die in the womb but it was His will that I share my loss with him that he might console me, console us and help us find healing.
Unbidden and unexpected, the tears began to flow. To be able to give oneself over the grief and tears is the gift I could accept only now after years of literally drowning sorrows. I listened to the story of the man who promised a fine chalice to the Lord if he could be blessed with a child but later changed his mind and tried to pass off a simple chalice, a gift that was rejected. When the son and the chalice were later lost at sea, the man prayed at the church of St. Nicholas. The chalice and the son were restored to him. Even though I loved to hear of the miracle delivered by St. Nicholas, I came to consider that reality that for me, for us, there was no miracle of restored life. In the emptiness of the moment, I began to sense another spirit around me, one that filled up the church. I came to recognize the spirit and I gave myself over to it. It was my son John. There were no words, no sounds, only a profound understanding that even if there was never to be a breath of life in this world there was soul that lives forever in fullness in God’s presence.
I wanted to live in that moment forever, to feel his presence forever but as the Mass ended, I felt the presence fade away. While the tears and the sadness still well up and haunt me, there is also a deeper feeling of peace.
Recently my cousin brought me a copy of a letter I wrote to my family after the death of my grandfather. It became the eulogy at his funeral. As I read through the letter again I was struck by the sincerity of what I said, I truly believed that the people in our life that we lose to death are not truly lost but they are waiting for us to join him in the next life, a life that has no end. I wondered how it came to be that I lost my faith. I still said the words I always had. I never let on to the world that where there was once was light and hope, darkness and pessimism came to reign. The descent was steady and relentless until I found a way to claim a daily reprieve based upon my spiritual condition from the insanity of disowned feelings, anger and resentment.
The spirit that filled the Cathedral was immense, deep, abiding and felt as real as the stones that walls are built from. I could only sense what little we have from the perspective of our limited understanding. The Spirit reached inside me and touched my soul and it has been marked with the gift of healing.
I prayed to be reconnected to God. It was his will that we reconnect through the soul of my son John. I have given the burden of grief over to him and asked him to take it from me. It is burden I can no longer carry. I expect that sadness and longing will continue. That we care is the gift given to humans. To be able to mourn our losses is part of our condition. To know, to really know that my son, my daughter and all who have departed from me will be restored to me is my salvation.
The challenge that has been given to me is to use this knowledge to reconnect with my living sons, my wife and family and to open my heart to let them in completely.
“We give thanks to the Lord. It is right to give Him thanks and praise.”
Peace be with you.
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