For Those of Us Still Longing on Christmas Morning...

I haven’t really known what to do with Advent this year.  In these weeks leading up to Christmas I’m hearing a lot about Anticipation and Hope and Light and, well, my life right now is not that.  It’s hard to anticipate the coming King of hope and light when life feels a little hopeless and dark, you know?  It’s hard to exist in the joyful spirit of Christmas when your spirit is anything but joyful.

A few weeks ago I attended an Advent service let by my friend Charity’s mom, Ruth.  For some reason I always seem to sense God’s presence more thickly when I’m in Ruth’s company.  She has a way with words that pierces right into my soul, making room for God to flood it more fully I guess.  So when some plans shifted around and I had the chance to attend her Advent service I made it a point to do so even though it meant meeting my family late for dinner.

I was a little nervous about the service, afraid it would be all about the joyful anticipation of Christ, about how the world was about to get a big ole’ dose of Hope and Light.  In other words, I was worried it would be about a whole bunch of crap that would make me feel even more out of place in the world around me.

But instead Ruth talked about longing.  About how our heart longs to see light.  About how we are longing for light in dark places.  And, as though she were talking directly to me, Ruth talked about how some of us are sitting in places of deep longing right now.  Longing that goes unmet. 

For an hour I sat in that service thinking about what my heart longs for.  There were obvious longings, and some less so.  I sat in the deep, aching longing and knew some of the things I yearned so gut-wrenchingly for would never be met. 

It’s easy to feel sort of lost in this holiday season when your state of being goes so far against the grain of everyone else’s.  You start to resent everyone who is so excited about the magic of the story of Christmas, the story of how God brought light and hope and love to earth in the form of a tiny human baby, when you are longing so deeply for light and hope and love and feeling so lost in darkness.  It’s hard to feel any sort of anticipation for God when you’re left feeling a little unsure of whom He is in the first place.

So this is for those of us who are left longing for light in this Advent season.  The ones uncertain that God really is who He said He was and can do what He promised He could.  The ones who will wake up on Christmas morning still feeling alone even though Immanuel, God With Us, has supposedly arrived.  To those of us who hate the story God is currently writing for you I can only offer this:  You are not alone.  I’m holding space for you, with you.  Sometimes my grief feels as though it’s a small child mid-tantrum, trying to break free from the hold I attempt to contain it in.  I like the idea of holding space in these moments, of giving my sadness room to thrash and wail and beat. 

I could tell you about how I’ve thought a lot about the Israelites that first Christmas who longed for a Messiah.  Things were dark, the future uncertain and their hearts longed for light.  And it came in the form of a baby.  I’m willing to bet that more than a few were a little unsure of God if this was his master plan for a Messiah.  I’m willing to bet that more than a few were still left longing in the face of that tiny human baby.

And sometimes, I can find comfort in that.  Sometimes I can be reminded that the story isn’t finished and light will eventually be revealed.   That Jesus is Immanuel even if I don’t feel it to be true.

But sometimes there just really isn’t any way to wrap all the darkness up with words that bring light.  Sometimes darkness is still just darkness, and longings remain unmet.  And in these times I’m finding that comfort only comes in the form of those who simply let it be what it is.  Who sit in the darkness with us and don’t try to force light.  Who don’t short-change our longings with inadequate substitutions.

If this Christmas finds you sitting in it, just know you aren’t alone.  I’m here.  Holding space for you.  With you. 

Denial and Anger and Other Stages of Grief I'm Not Ready to Deal With

Denial and anger are two of the first stages of grief.  I understand these emotions more than I could have possibly imagined.  I seem to vacillate between the two in these weeks following my dad’s death, continually moving back and forth between disbelief and rage.

Denial is a strange one.  I think I understand why it’s necessary to process death though.  I don’t know that our brains can fully comprehend the idea that someone is here one day and simply gone the next.  I’m not sure we would be able to allow another person to immerse themselves in our day to day lives so fully, depend on them so completely if we really understood that in a moment they could be gone.  And so when that very thing happens you must function with a certain amount of denial, believing the person to just be on a long trip or out to pick up coffee.  You do this until you can get used to life without them.

It’s funny, even though I saw the death certificate with my own eyes, hugged his hard, decidedly un-lifelike body at the wake, even hid the box of his remains after his cremation from my mom, I still have this strange little hope that I’ll come home one day and see him reading the paper at the table.  Or that he’ll come walking through the front door, explaining it was all a misunderstanding.  Or even that I’ll run into him at Mariano’s where he’ll marvel at what an amazing grocery store it is.  Even if I never see him again there’s a part of me that thinks he’s out there somewhere else in the world, alive still and blessing the world with his Irish eyes, just not able to be with us anymore.  I understand why people find comfort in reincarnation now.  I understand a lot of things I never used to. 

Before all this I thought that it would be the worst to have a loved one missing, their whereabouts and status unknown.  It seemed like torture to wonder year after year if they’d come home, to hope day after day that this would be the one on which they’d walk through the door.  It seemed easier, to me, to know for sure that they were gone than to be stuck in that endless cycle of mostly false hope, unable to move on with your life.  Now, I would give anything for a shred of hope that my dad would one day walk through that door again.

Anger bubbles beneath the surface and I never know when it will lash out inappropriately.  I yell at Toots for changing her mind about milk or water when really I want to yell at God for writing this part of my story.  Hard to open packages infuriate me and when my kids and I all got sick two weeks ago and no one slept I literally pounded on a wall at 2 am and considered taking a carton of eggs outside in the middle of the night so I could throw something that would break. 

I’m afraid of getting stuck in these stages, trapped between anger and denial.  I don’t want to become a person who lives only in states of fury or disassociation from reality.

I find myself running through a list of reasons of why this is still so hard.  I defend myself not being able to interact normally when the subject of my dad comes up or make it through the day without crying.  We’ve been living with him for seven months.  That was seven months in which he had become an indispensible part of my every day life.  He was so young; we were still so dependent on him, all of us.  It was so sudden; we didn’t have time to prepare.  He was just so good.  There really aren’t enough words to encapsulate all the wonderfulness that is now simply gone.  And maybe these are all significant reasons for why this still feels almost as hard as it did three weeks ago.  Or maybe death is just this hard.

I understand that acceptance is the final stage of grief in as much as I understand that I have not reached acceptance.  It almost feels as though my whole being fights against acceptance these days.  I think about how my mom will have to attend weddings alone from now on or how he’ll never take Toots to the park or build a Brio train for Monster and something deep within fires up, actively pushing this truth away.  My lack of acceptance may just be the truest thing about all of this right now.