What We Carry

Every year I join an online community focused on Advent. Some years, I participate in the chat; most years, though, I simply read the beautiful meditations by Jan Richardson and freewrite about the questions she poses in my journal.

And, I have two other Advent devotionals I really love and try to read whenever I have a break throughout the day, as well as my own writing practice of trying to post here. Plus, every year I have a devotional I carefully choose for the year, not always rooted in Christianity—though this year’s is. So, it, too, has become an Advent devotional in this time of year.

I mean, what can I say? I love this season.

Usually I am up early, sitting with the readings, then working out, then letting the dogs out, then getting a shower in, all before the first child needs my attention at 7:00. But this year my grandson has some days needed care earlier than that—and other days, because of the demands of the kids, work, and life, I’ve used that morning time to get other things done (or, if I’ve been up late, to sleep).

So this year, I am a week behind on reading Jan Richardson’s reflections, and I haven’t even opened the other three books all season. We haven’t finished decorating or gone to cut down our tree or finished shopping for the kids. We skipped the outside lights because we ran out of time and energy. When my aunt came to visit, my spouse cleaned the house while I was at work, and I showed up three hours after she arrived to pick her up from where the shuttle had dropped her off an hour away from us because I was so behind at work. (She was gracious; she gave the Perkins server a big tip and by the time I got there, he was calling her “mom.”).

When she arrived into the chaos, we stayed up late talking the first night, baking the second night, then went to my mother-in-law’s for a full day of baking—and now, when she arrives this morning, we’ll have a half day with my spouse and all the kids and she’ll be off.

It went too fast.

And all of this time, I have been carrying around my journal, my laptop, my two paper Advent devotionals, and the devotional I’ve been using all year almost everywhere I go, literally. I think, “Maybe after grocery shopping I can sit in the parking lot and read something” or “maybe I’ll get a break at work and go to the library, find a quiet space, read Jan Richardson’s meditation and write” or “maybe if I leave work five minutes early and my grandson isn’t looking out the window I can read something before heading into daycare to pick him up.”

It hasn’t happened. The bag is heavy, and each time I lift it over my shoulder to haul it to the next place I’m going, my shoulder aches a little.

My grandson likes to grab books of the shelves in our house and hand them to me. He knows I love to read and delight in books. He also, well, just likes making a mess, like any two and a half year old. If it’s a kid’s book, he wants me to read it—but often it’s a random adult novel or book of poetry. A few days ago he grabbed The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a book I haven’t read in years but that I remember well.

O’Brien lists all of the things Vietnam soldiers carried into battle, starting with the mundane, moving into the weaponry, then into the sentimental. By the end of that first short piece in the book (I haven’t read it in years, and haven’t looked at it before writing this, so I may be misremembering), you are drawn into all they have lost, and how what they carry is both about necessity and loss.

When I saw the title I immediately thought about my heavy bag—and I realize I’m treading on difficult ground here, because of course, that bag is nothing to the horrors Vietnam vets, including my cousin, suffered, or what they had to carry all of their lives. Then, when I realized the connection was faulty, my mind wandered to my old neighbor and friend Claire, whose brother had died in Vietnam. I had talked with her about her brother, that terrible loss, which she always carried with her.

And then, we lost Claire this year. I missed her funeral because I had to take one of the kids out of town for an event that weekend. I haven’t yet written a card or seen her husband. He’d left to live closer to a hospital at the end of her life, and I thought he’d sold the house and moved closer to his daughter, that I’d never see him again. But I recently learned he’s back in town, living in the house they had shared for decades, located just two doors down from the last house I lived in town.

Claire and her husband Joe were the best neighbors anyone could have ever dreamed of having. When my first long term partner and I split up and I bought my first house as a single person, they were in the neighborhood to welcome me. They were there, too, for all the big milestones of 10 years of my life—Lisa’s adoption, Lisa’s graduation, my wedding (I’m not sure if I’d ever come out to them prior to meeting my spouse, but they didn’t blink an eye). I had seen them occasionally but not as often since we moved. I went from thinking about my bag to feeling ashamed that I hadn’t yet connected with Joe since his return to Morris.

Somehow, The Things They Carried ended up in my bag, weighing it down yet further. I have no idea how it happened, but my guess is that little hands or my absent-mindedness or maybe synchronicity were involved. I noticed it when I got to work and opened the bag, only to have a student knock on my door immediately after settling in. I noticed it again at the end of the day when I closed the bag—the rest of the day had been a blur of work/meeting/work/meeting/deadline/deadline/deadline.

On a whim the next day, after picking up my grandson from daycare, I drove by Joe’s house. When I got there, my chest caved in. All the years I’d lived down the street, Joe had put up a giant star on the front of their house—the only decoration. I loved that star because of its simplicity and because to me it was basically a metaphor for who Joe and Claire were to me—guides, stars, people I could count on. I hadn’t expected him to put it up in this year of such terrible loss, but there it was.

I knocked on the door. He wasn’t home. I don’t know what I would have said or done if he’d answered—I didn’t have anything with me, and my grandson was waiting in his carseat in a running car. I got back into the car, resolving to write him a card and bring over some Christmas treats another time. Then I sat in the car and read one page in one of the books I had been carrying around in that bag that felt, by that point in the Advent season, like necessity.

It opened with the Magnificat, and that’s as far as I got. It was time to go home, and my grandson was getting restless. The words echoed in my mind all evening—and it was a rough evening—and I felt the strength of Mary’s song carrying me.

Maybe carrying that bag around was worth it after all. Maybe the number of times I open it to read something out of one of the books or online matters less than the desire to stay grounded in this season of beginnings and endings, of hope continuing in people like Joe, who put up his star even in these dark days.