The Missing Scott Chronicles

Christmas Blessings

Christmas trees, arms laden with heavy gifts, crystalline flakes sparkling like bits of graphite enveloped me as I drove home from the clinic the evening prior to the celebration of Christ’s birth. I was thinking how odd it was that I could admire the frigid, moonlit beauty one moment, and with just a little curve in the slippery road, suddenly the tectonic plate of my mind shifted. I was looking down into the bleak, cavernous blackness that was now my future.

Pulling over so as to avoid sliding into the abyss, I allowed the writhing spasms of guttural cries to fill the empty cab of the truck that once held our ever-holding hands. The strange dichotomy of that blessed heart anesthesia, disrupted suddenly by the awareness of open-heart surgery’s icy metal tools, made me think of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving. I wondered petulantly at the audacity of someone scientifically categorizing the private erratic meanderings of a treacherous broken heart.

Stepping out of the big Tundra truck that had been his dream, my too-large, thrift-store Columbia boots alighted with that scrunching sound that brought me back many years to a paper route on a freezing Minnesota morning, before the dawn broke. Yet the day was already alive with ethereal, bejeweled wonder. It was a strange sensation that awakened in me the realization that my life was coming full circle. Those frigid mornings in the predawn, freezing cold, Ray and I would swear that when we grew up, we would never live in a place like this, Yet here I was, and I was glad I was. But there, at the top of the perimeter of my life’s rotunda, its fragile thread severed and hung low, blown about by the breathless loss as I watched with sadness in my mind’s eye. But as I watched that gossamer ribbon torn and hanging down, it was captured again by a golden thread of grace from the other side. It was tied by the hand of a loving God to the adrift one and sealed into the heart-shaped pattern of my life. My life was not a simple circle of life but a life full of love.

I suddenly realized it was Christmas, the celebration of the Savior’s birth. It was He who had found me that fateful day, the twenty-fifth year of my life, and shortly thereafter made this dreamer’s dreams come true in gifting me with a love that stood strong and beautiful for thirty-six plus years. What a Christmas gift I had been given that day in 1983. Now I must give him back to the One who loves him even more than I.

I became more aware of myself burrowed deep in the arms of this new community, this new family. Covered in handmade quilts and blankets, and comfort shawls, admiring the beautiful ornaments, books, gifts, and heartfelt mementos, I reread the comforting words on piles and piles of cards that spilled over the top of our extra-large coffee table. I tried again to find a place in the overstuffed fridge for yet another home-cooked meal, dessert, and treats embellished with offers of absolutely any need I had being willingly met. I gazed mesmerized, pools of tears blurring the missives, at hundreds of messages on the hypnotic screen of my iPhone. There were words of love, encouragement, and hope. And I knew why Jesus had chosen this place for us when Scott went home. Our little fatherless girls were cocooned in the constant, compassionate embraces of teachers, nurses, coaches, bus drivers, and office staff of an iconic, one-building schoolhouse for grades kindergarten through twelve. Our little white church, sitting with its pretty bell tower pointing proudly to the Savior we love, on a hilltop at the crux of the idyllic little mountain village, became as all church families should, our true family. From the night Scott suddenly closed his eyes forever in my arms, they have never left our side and never left a need unmet or a tear undried. The patients and staff at the clinic—those I was called here to serve, to help, to heal—suddenly turned their benevolent, tender hearts back upon their doctor.

In our earthly family, biology never determined who would make us up. Each member was carefully chosen and grafted into a family made by our loving Lord Jesus. And when our patriarch—the best husband, the best father, the best brother, the best leader, the best friend—was taken home in a moment, in the twinkling of a tearful eye, this family God created came together as few biological families ever will. A depth of love, forgiveness, and loyalty emerged from those who had already suffered so much, and now must suffer again, but never again alone.