A Backwards Advent -- or an Early Holy Week

Advent is a time of expectation, preparation and contemplation. It's a beautiful season, my favorite, really.  I enjoy the Christmas lights on my neighbor's house and, for the first time in years, I couldn't wait to put up the little Christmas tree.  I've refrained from listening to Christmas carols on my iPod, although my favorite radio station plays them more and more often as we get closer to Christmas Eve, as do the stores I go in. Christmas Day will change all that, but until then, even though the world may be in Christmas, I'll still be in Advent, waiting, preparing and contemplating.

This Advent, though, will be a slightly different kind of waiting, preparing and contemplating. On one hand I will be in a traditional Advent but in another I will be waiting, preparing and contemplating something quite different. Sometime, very probably in the relatively near future, I will be losing a member of my family.

Lots of relatives and friends have died. I've experienced death rites and rituals from a very young age so it was and has always been a part of life. I mourn, yet I accept it as the natural progression of things. Somehow, it doesn't seem right to be thinking about death in a season so focused on anticipation of a miraculous birth (an aren't all births miraculous in some way?). It feels as if the candles on the Advent wreath were all lit but are now being extinguished, one by one, just as his life is being extinguished one day, one hour, one minute at a time. It even feels like an out-of-place Holy Week, with Good Friday somewhere down the road, not terribly far away but just around a corner that I can't see yet.

Part of my discomfort is that he is half a country away, too far for me to travel at this time and the only contact I have is via phone lines. That's okay, I'm not one to sit at bedsides, waiting for the inevitable. I just don't do well with that, and I think he would know that. We still talk on the phone, just like I did this morning, but every time I notice that a little less of him is there.  Still, I sit and wait, anticipating the call that will come, sooner rather than later, and contemplating the lives we have shared for the past 66 years. We might not talk for months, but we've always been able to pick up where we left off as if the intervening moments between the last time we talked didn't really exist. This morning we recalled our goofing around and breaking a leg off the piano bench. We both got in trouble over that -- him at the ripe old age of about 16, me about 4. We also remembered the thousands of choruses of "Goodnight, Irene," we used to sing together. He was, and is, my big brother, and those memories are part of us -- and him.

It's still Advent. It's still time to wait, to think, to prepare. Hopefully Christmas will arrive on time and in time, because my big brother said he'd call me on Christmas Day. I don't want to hear that call at the cost of his pain and suffering, but oh, I can't think of a Christmas present I'd rather have. What happens after that---- only God knows, just as God knows if it will happen as my brother promised. Still, I will live in Advent until whichever comes -- Christmas Day or a personal Good Friday.