Losing something like your keys or your wallet creates a sense of internal panic that never seems to be shared by the lucky folks around you who are blithely going on about their business, basking in the security of not having lost a thing.

Getting ready to leave Asheville’s Grove Park Inn on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I suddenly realized that my coat was missing along with my car fob that I’d left in the coat pocket. This wasn’t nearly as big a concern to the helpful but busy staff members at the inn as it was to me. All I could think about though was all the cooking I had to do before Thanksgiving and how I was going to get home to start my baking without that fob to start my car.

After more than an hour of searching, just as I was ready to despair, I remembered St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost causes, and the poem a Catholic friend of mine had taught me for occasions like these: “Dear Saint Anthony, please come around, something is lost and must be found.”  No sooner had I begun reciting it than the wait person who had served my sister and me elegant drinks on the terrace the night before appeared with my coat! It felt like a true Thanksgiving miracle.

My sister Pam and I had spent the night at the elegant Grove Park Inn so that she could see the inn’s famous gingerbread house display. Pam had been wanting to see the gingerbread competition for a long time and this was the year she finally got around to it. We arrived to find the Grove Park Inn decked out in all its holiday glory. With incredible mountain views outside every window, it was a dazzling sight.

I wasn’t as interested in the gingerbread houses as I was in sharing this experience with Pam. Just three years earlier, she was on life support in the neuro-ICU at Atlanta’s Emory Hospital, in critical condition after an aneurysm burst in her brain. For many dark days, Pam’s friends and family members stood by her bedside, willing her to wake up with stories and songs. One of the things I repeated to her again and again during those long hours was that she was going to wake up and that, when she did, we would go see the gingerbread houses in Asheville.

I had plenty of time in that hospital room three years ago to reflect on loss and what it would mean for me and the rest of our family to lose Pam. Loss is one of the hardest challenges we face, whether what’s lost is car keys or basketball games or relationships or people we love. It’s no wonder that Amazing Grace is everyone’s favorite hymn. Who can forget that powerful moment when President Obama broke into song last summer at the service remembering the victims of the Charleston shooting. “I once was lost but now I’m found.” In the face of any loss, great or small, what we are all hoping for is to find what is gone and if that isn’t possible, to find grace.

Pam miraculously recovered and woke from a coma with her brain function intact and now, here we were, in the beautiful mountains of Asheville, marveling at those gingerbread houses that I had talked to her about so many times in her hospital room. We walked through the halls of the Grove Park Inn, admiring the varied entries and the meticulous patience it must take to create them. My favorite entry in the gingerbread competition, an advent calendar created by a group of high school students, didn’t win the grand prize but the teens who built it are certainly not losers.

Loss is hard because it raises so many questions, many of which will never be answered. In these times when mass killings are becoming commonplace and the existence of our planet is threatened and Dook is winning national championships, it’s easy to despair. But even in the face of evil and danger, there are moments of grace large and small. Sisters wake up from comas and car keys are found and teen-agers spend careful hours constructing magical gingerbread structures and we remember that all is not lost and that, in this holiday season, gratitude still comes easily.

November 24, 2015, County #27 – Buncombe