The Promise

Snow covers everything except the roadways and wherever people have made the effort to clear it. It is piled high at intersections and in parking lots, covered with the black grime from car emissions and scraped asphalt. Most of the trees are but grey black sticks piercing the frozen snow. Even the evergreens aren’t recognizably green. Flying into Columbus, the world below looked black and white, void of color. I had forgotten how ugly Midwestern winters can get. Snow is beautiful when it is fresh, fluffy and falling. Its beauty does not last as people have their way with it. Tromping it, scraping it, shoveling it and salting it down change it from a beautiful white heavenly blanket into the dirty, tattered and torn, misfit coat of a skid row alcoholic. The beautiful and the ugly each in the eye of the beholder and neither eternal are my lessons of life and death.

The scene outside is not so different than the scene inside my childhood home. The floor is covered with green and blue shag carpet, once proudly purchased and installed as part of our remodeling in the early 1970s. I remember with a chuckle the classmate who came home from school with me one day and asked if she could do my chore of vacuuming the carpet. She wanted the experience of vacuuming our new shag carpeting. Today it not only dates the house but matted and discolored it looks old, worn out and years beyond the point of needing replaced. What was once beautiful is now ugly and depressing. Wallpaper stained, paint chipping and the smell of antiques adds to the feeling of eminent death. What was once new has become old. What was once bright and shining is now dull and cracked. For everything there is a cycle of life.

For two days, I have sat by my father lying in the hospital bed provided by hospice. I have learned to give him Vicodin, Ativan and Morphine. I have closed my eyes and helped him take care of personal needs that a daughter never imagines she will be doing. Interspersed with the care giving are brief conversations about the past. We remember the way I used to come running into the same room and jump into his lap. Oh, what a difference forty plus years have made. Today such a move would probably kill him, put me in the hospital and break the chair into pieces. We laughed at the absurdity, then reminisce about the winters I sat on the arm of his recliner, weaving potholders and watching Ohio State basketball with him. He would crochet the edges of my potholders when I had one completed. Such was the way we spent our winters waiting for spring and the new life that would bloom.

I bought this bunch of tulips home from the grocery store yesterday, beautiful pink with spring green leaves. As I trimmed them and arranged them in a vase, my mother removed the poinsettia from the kitchen table and replaced it with the vase of tulips, remarking how she hopes the bulbs she planted last fall will bloom this spring. In a household waiting for death, the tulips remind us that spring will come and new life will spring forth. It is the promise of creation.

Hymn of Promise

There’s a song in every silence,
Seeking word and melody;
There’s a dawn in every darkness,
Bringing hope to you and me.
From the past will come the future;
What it holds, a mystery
Unrevealed until its season,
Something God alone can see.

In our end is our beginning;
In our time, infinity;
In our doubt there is believing;
In our life, eternity.
In our death, a resurrection;
At the last a victory,
Unrevealed until its season,
Something God alone can see