Gloria in Excelsis Deo: Holy Triduum 2022

On these milestone days or holy days, I cannot help but be pensive as I look in retrospect.

Easter 2022 . . . Home for just over a year, we are really starting to settle into our family's "new normal" (hate that phrase). My big goal this year for me personally is to be able to start living beyond just this moment now and just maybe possibly putting on my own oxygen mask first every once in a while.

Easter 2021 . . . Thomas had been discharged from the hospital only five days early after the hardest eleven months of all of our lives. My smile belies that I was in a state of deep grief and thus began the year (at home) that ranks as the second hardest of our lives.

Easter 2020 . . . we were one month into "fourteen days to slow the spread," we were reeling from churches being closed, even for Easter, and Chris's mother had been in the ICU with COVID for 14 days at that point. She would remain cruelly isolated by the medical-political system for nearly half a year before she passed. We did not yet know that Thomas would be diagnosed with cancer one day shy of two months later, but his one-pound tumor had probably started growing by that Easter.

But back to how this year's Triduum played out . . .

Good Friday 2022

We all attended Stations, then I took half the crew home while Chris stayed with the other half for Confessions and a 2-hour Good Friday liturgy. (By "attending" Stations, I mean that my little ones had to be taken out twice to go potty, and then I refused to disrupt by re-entering a third time, so we stood in the narthex where I felt like my young ones were the only churchgoing kids who simply do not know how to be quiet.)

In the evening, two families visiting for the Triduum from out of state came over for Good Friday dinner and a great time was had by the six adults and 13 children.

Holy Saturday

Dying Eggs

One of the things I dropped in the juggling act that is my life is remembering to buy an Easter egg dying kit, so I looked up online how to dye eggs (food dye, vinegar, boiling water). The takeaway is that I'm never going to buy a kit again!

Lots of Outdoor Play in Gorgeous Weather

So much outdoor play, including the three little engineers digging not one, not two, but three "wells" in the back yard, filling buckets with soil and water from the hose, making "mud" to glue bricks together, and then tromping all that dirt into the house onto the fresh floors, mopped only hours before for the Easter triduum weekend.

Easter Sunday

Dad and the older crew went the to Easter Mass, with the new Easter fire and ceremonies beginning at 10:00 p.m., then Mass, and around 1:00 a.m. there was a big ol' party with masses of food.

The Easter bonfire shot at least 15 feet into the air!

After Mass, during the socializing, the priest got out his guitar and sang folk songs with everyone, too! In my ~17 years of Catholic experience, seeing it both ways, I can say that it is a radically different parish if the priest regularly socializes with his parishioners (both after Mass and eating meals at homes). Truly, such a joy. Vocations would blossom if priests typically did this.

Meanwhile, on Easter morning, the children woke up to our family Easter basket of gifties, the most popular of which was a simple set of jacks.

We enjoyed breakfast before an Easter egg hunt.

Last Easter, I set up the hunt in the front yard, with its sidewalks and driveway, because Thomas was still in a wheelchair. This year, I hid about 150, color-coded eggs in the entire back yard, so it took eleven whole minutes to find them all. Success!

I took most of the crew to the 12:30 (daytime) Easter Mass, and then came home to prepare dinner. I have no photos of the beautiful spread because the children descended upon it like starving wolves (instead of like kids who have been eating candy all day).

Dinner Menu 2022

Ham
Deviled eggs
Roasted Brussels sprouts
Sweet potato casserole (low-sugar)
Fettuccine Alfredo
Whole wheat rolls
Desserts: Homemade no-sugar-added apple pie plus store-bought cheesecake and gelato

Monday at the Hospital

No rest for the weary, so we spent Monday with Thomas at Levine's, getting a liver biopsy done. It's a minor procedure, but given that one has to arrive to pre-op hours ahead of time and then stay 4+ hours afterward (plus have bloodwork done) in order to make sure there is no bleeding . . . well, that makes for a full day.

In the pre-op waiting room

Everything went well. Apparently one doesn't stay in PACU for four hours, so we were moved to the 11th floor--our old stomping grounds of Heme-Onc--and admitted for all of three more hours. I didn't realize I'd feel rising panic inside at being inpatient on that floor, but now I know. For the first four blood pressure readings, Thomas was around 100 over 35, and--given that bleeding is the complication they were watching for and that bleeding out will probably be my most feared medical complications for the rest of my life--I felt quite nervous at such low readings. But then it got "better" at 100 over 48 before normalizing a couple of hours later. His repeat CBC showed stable hemoglobin, so they sent us on our merry way to arrive home at 8:00 p.m.