Just Write: Hands

I've become very well acquainted with the couch these past two months.

It seems like longer. Between first-trimester ailments and three rounds of illness, my energy levels have been nonexistent; and so has any work that doesn't involve simply typing on the computer or keeping the children alive and sometimes fed. 

It's in these brackets of time and space, where I begin to fathom the incredible love from the people in my life and their hearts for serving. 

It's the little-big things that stop me in my tracks, have me giving thanks. 

My sister offers to cook dinner for us the day we arrive home from Florida because she knows we've been awake since 5 a.m. and our fridge is pretty much void of most food. 

Friends who've been staying at our house while they were looking for a new home during the time we were away vacuum the floors and line the beds with clean sheets topping the pillows with mints, fresh for our arrival home. 

John's dad picks us up from the airport early in the morning complete with after-flight snacks.

My grandma does our laundry and cooks dinner almost every single night we're with her and my grandpa at their condo. 

Friends whisper prayers, send cards and emails and flowers for my birthday or just to encourage my heart. Or blend juice lemon and ginger and bring it to our meetings so I can find relief from morning sickness. 

John does double duty with kids and work -- with a smile {and house and food prep}.

It just doesn't stop -- the pouring out of love and the generosity of time and the service of hands. 

And my hands in this season -- all I can do is fold them in prayer, offering thanks

and humbly receive the love that's been freely and generously given. 

Thinking, that's all: On this day, I can't help but think of him

When I finally heard his deep south-side Chicago-accented voice via phone ten years ago today, my body shook with tears as I breathed an audible sigh of relief into the speaker.

He finally called me from his post at the fire station {or hospital? can I even remember that minute detail}, sadness enveloped in his voice as he spoke about the brothers, the sister lost their lives while responding to the World Trade Center attacks.

There was an ache in his words I'd never heard before, a crack in his normally composed voice that made me realize that while my firefighter father didn't die that day, a piece of his heart surely did.

****
I grew up with fears of losing my father to the thick smoke and billowing flames of a burning building. Scenes from Backdraft were etched into my six-year-old brain, and I'd begged and pleaded with him to do a different job more times than I could remember.

My father, the stoic, old-school Italian he was, would hug his little girl and simply explain that being a firefighter was his job, his calling, his passion, his duty.

It was as much a part of him as every thick wave of black hair on his head.

I never questioned him again, and I knew bravery was required by even those of us who simply prayed for their loved ones to emerge from overnight-shift shadows unscathed, every-day heroes.

****

He sported an NYFD baseball hat the last time I saw him alive and well, his large, Italian body unbound to a hospital bed, free to live and enjoy the freedoms he so loved about our country.

We'd talked about that day for some reason -- that blue-skyed perfectly sunny day in September of 2001 -- during his last visit to my house.

He wore it on his sleeve even eight years later -- the horror and terror and pain rendered on his serviceman heart from both the assault on our homeland and on his brotherhood. His voice cracked as he spoke about wives who lost firefighter husbands and children who lost fathers and mothers and fathers who lost sons at the call of duty.

But duty calls, and we respond, he'd said.

Respond they surely had, many with their lives.

****

This anniversary of September 11 brims with more emotion than most any other day of the year in the wake of unexpectedly losing him.

Because this day -- it was his day, in so many more ways than the anniversary of my father's death will ever be or the day of his birth ever could stand up to.

Because this day?

This day is about responding amid the shadows of uncertainty and horror to the deep need of your neighbor, a stranger, nonetheless, but still a neighbor.

This day is about putting aside the well being of self and trudging through shaking ground in response to cries for help.

This day is about taking evil by the throat and not letting it claim any more than it already has.

It's about service and duty and love.

So I can't help, as I remember, as I honor the brave responders, but to also remember, honor him.