A Year Later

My husband was hospitalized several times a year ago last fall with issues related to serious heart failure.  In January I couldn’t help but wonder if he would live to see another Christmas. I remember dismantling the tree and wrapping each ornament carefully, nostalgically.  Then climbing the drop-down steps to the attic and stacking the boxes neatly, thinking I might be a widow the next time they came to light.  Although accepting of the situation, I was anxious.  Fearful.

This afternoon I climbed those steps again.  I carried the boxes into the living room, and unwrapped the ornaments – one by one by one.  My lively husband hunted down the Christmas CD’s and filled the house with music.  He built a fire in the fireplace before parking himself in a chair near the flickering flames with a good book.

For a couple of hours I trimmed our skinny little tree, perfect for our modest house, and decked the halls with stockings and candles and poinsettias.  In the process, I remembered what it was like this time last year.  How uncertainty loomed big, how I wondered what the future might hold. The heart failure specialist later confessed he expected my husband to die before the New Year.  As it was, his recovery was unexpected and unprecedented.

As I enjoy our festive house this evening, plenty of things are still unknown.  Others are more real, more focused. I seem changed in some core way.  Perhaps I’m more aware of others and their needs, as well as my own. My perspectives are more flexible, more open. I’ve learned that less is often more, that diligence pays dividends, that the pursuit of God leads to an encounter with glory that shines more brightly than any vision of what I think is best.