Calendar of Events

As I’m sitting on the couch tonight, I glance a gift that comes to us each December: the family calendar. Each year, Bev’s mom makes a home made calendar with some wonderful computer generated pictures for us to hang somewhere in our house. I found myself wondering where those pictures come from and how someone would ever think that two squirrels eating nuts on a tree branch-January-or three green frogs amidst some red roses-November-might be a good idea for a calendar. Evidently they were right, as the evidence sits next to me on the desk.

The calendar also has the names of all the birthday’s and anniversaries for the coming year. It doesn’t take me long to check and make sure mine is on there—you never know when you are an in-law—and sure enough, I will be 37 in June (green gecko on a stick), and I also see that Bev’s grandmother will be 93 in April (four orange fish in a pond).

Finally, the back page of the calendar has all the phone numbers, addresses, and emails of all the siblings in the family, from Minnesota to Missouri and points in-between. And as I’m glancing through the calendar listing of names and ages, Bev realizes-and this was difficult to realize—that her brother Delwyn’s name is no longer on the address list, no longer listed with the birthdays. I double check—he would’ve been 44 in 2009 and his name isn't there.

Suddenly it strikes me tonight, almost as much as the day he died suddenly from a blood clot a few years ago, that he is no longer with us. It seems raw once again. I can feel it in the room that it is hard for Bev too. He doesn’t even have a date in the family calendar. To me, on this night, that makes me feel sad. I want to phone Bev’s mom and tell her to put his name back on there, and mark the day he died on the calendar with a cross. But it’s not my family and that might be too hard for a mom to have to remember that day in that way. So we will try to remember without the reminder.

As I’m considering Delwyn and what the rest of his life might have been, I catch myself thinking about the child we lost when we had a miscarriage and think now what that life would've, could've, maybe should've been. I mention that to Bev and she tells me that child, if born on her due date would have been four on March 8, 2009. She remembers the due date of a child we lost in the middle of camping trip one summer day a few years back; this is itself offers me a new perspective. There is no way the pain we felt that day matches the pain that Bev and her family felt when their son and brother died. When you can put a face to suffering you just feel it in a deeper way. But I also know pain when I see it, and losing that child beat us up bad. It raised lots of questions and there are few answers. I have no intention of putting all of this grief in a nice tight box with a bow on it; losing people we love, whether a child in a womb or a son that would have been 44 is just plain tough and I know death is not the way God intended things to be.

So tonight as I finish thinking about this, I go over to the calendar and I find December--two white doves in a tree--and I put Delwyn’s name on December 17 to remember his birthday. And I got to March 16 and put a cross to remember the day he passed onto greater glory. And then I got to March 8, and put a little cross to remember a child I never knew but still miss, and that pain is real to me tonight. Aah,March—a family of four mice trying to survive by looking for grain in a winter field.