When I placed our movie camera in the auto record position, I had no idea that I was chronicling the miscarriage of a daughter we would never know. As I set up the tripod astride the expectant Christmas tree, I had intended to record a charming tree-decorating party complete with hot chocolate, Frank Sinatra, and a twenty-two month old elf. The tape began with the redundant pattern of our wobbly toddler carrying a series of be-hooked bingles, boggles, and beads to the outstretched coniferous arms of our Scotch pine.
About twenty minutes into the video, my pregnant wife exited the room, leaving Annalise and me to the pleasant monotony of pine tree beautification. Several minutes later, Lisa stepped back into the frame just as Frank Sinatra’s merry voice had begun to paint a classic Christmas picture in three quarter time. Into this warm scene, broke the bracing cold news that all was not well. The contrasting image of something unnamed that had gone terribly wrong, set against the backdrop of Christmas cheer, produced a video reminiscent of a Stanley Kubrick classic
The abrupt conclusion of that film resulted from my sudden awareness that a not-so-hidden camera was documenting an intimate moment of pain in our lives. But even with the camera off, the human memory has a way of chronicling pivotal life’s moments. During significant life events, the movie camera of our meaning-seeking minds never stops recording.
Nowadays, when the topic of that sad event surfaces, Lisa and I unconsciously go back into the video library of our memories and pull up that footage. Thanks to the many small gestures of turning toward each other rather than away, this key event in our lives is memorialized as a time of closeness, rather than simply a time of pain and sadness. Taking the day off of work, praying with one another inchurch pre-doctor’s office, crying in the OB/Gyn’s office, sharing a previously banned, post-gestational beer, followed by Lisa falling asleep in my arms—all of these little moments form the matrix out of which Lisa and I have constructed our memories of that event.
It seems to me that life is punctuated by key moments like the one I just described. They exist like small memorials within the gallery of our imagination. In a marriage, or other close relationship, those memorials function like points in a connect-the-dots pattern. In relationships characterized by fidelity, intimacy, and satisfaction, the pattern is dotted with key moments in which partners showup with gestures of generosity, kindness, and warmth.
By way of contrast, the outlines of unhappy relationships plot a course through nodal moments that memorialize omissions and empathetic failures. For example, I know a dad who refused to attend his son’s wedding due to an unresolved conflict. What should have been an unqualified happy event, is now forever tinged by the sadness of a father’s absence.
This Sunday my church’s liturgical cycle served up a slice of scripture lifted from a section out of John’s Gospel entitled, “The Farewell Discourses” (John, chapters 14-17) Scipture scholars believe that The Discourses are to John’s Gospel, what the The Beatitudes are for Luke and Matthew’s Gospel. They represent the heart of Jesus’ message and personhood. The literary choice to place this important section of text just before Christ goes to his death, represent a keen understanding of how human beings naturally memorialize key events. It’s almost as if the author is saying, “Slow down! Soak this up, one-word-at-a-time.”
That toddler I told you about earlier in this article is all grown up now. In two weeks, I will accompany her down an aisle, and step aside as she steps irrevocably into the rest of her life with Matt at her side. At this nodal moment in Annalise’s life, I have found myself asking “How can I intentionally shape a suitable memorial for this incredibly important turn in the road?” How can I—through a gift, a letter, a piece of artwork, or some other symbol—create something that will occupy a treasured space within the trophy cases of Annalise and Matt’s imaginations?
On the other end of the spectrum from nodal moments, would be those simple daily acts that carry weight for the person you intend to love: a surprise trip to a shaved ice shack on the way home from school, breakfast in bed for no reason, a fresh picked wild flower bouquet, dinner served by candle light, and/or music, a chocolate chip pancake dinner just because… why not?
It seems to me that one dimension of the command to “love one another” has to do with imitating the main character in this Sunday’s Gospel by sacramentalizing the events of life with our transforming gestures of intentional, intelligent, memorializing love.
Thank you for sharing a very personal loss, how you chose to get through that difficult event, and how you have chosen to chronicle the memory! In really glad I found your Sunday Morning Cafe meditations! May God continue to bless you through out your life!