People often have a difficult time coping with holidays after
someone they love has died. It is particularly hard if the person has died
during the holiday.
In the months after our son’s diagnosis, we were given a few
streamers of hope to hold on to:
Perhaps God would reach down and heal him….
Perhaps the melanoma specialist in St. Louis would be able
to enroll him in the clinical trial for the new drug that was showing so much
promise…
But as December advanced, our grasp on those streamers
became more and more tenuous.
I tend to think of December 13 as the day marking the
beginning of the end of our son’s life, because that was the day he went to the
hospital for a palliative operation to remove the tumor in his abdomen and was
so sick that the surgeon cancelled the
procedure.
That was the day we were told
any further surgical treatment would be futile. The day the streamers of hope
were jerked out of our hands. Our son’s physical life came to an end a few days
short of a month later.
Last year grief settled heavily on my shoulders, like a
heavy winter coat. I was not expecting that to happen; it was, after all, the second Christmas since his death. The surprise of it hit us like a 2 x 4. I barely functioned.
I had little enthusiasm for anything. I don’t think I sent a single Christmas
card.
I can feel it happening again this year, but not nearly as
bad, perhaps just a windbreaker instead of an arctic parka.
We almost never cry anymore. If one accepts the definition of
mourning as outward expressions of inward grief, then our time of active mourning
appears to be coming to an end. Another stage in the process of adjusting to
the new normal in our life and moving forward.
After every snowfall, the huge state dump truck with the
plow on the front comes down the access road and scrapes the snow to the side, leaving
a huge berm of snow right in front of our driveway when it turns around. Depending
on how much snow was on the road, we could sometimes just drive through it, but
on other occasions, we would have to go out with a pickaxe and shovels and break
through the barrier so we could get out. This year, God bless them, our new
neighbor got into his handy dandy little Bobcat machine and cleared the ridges
of snow away from both of our driveways.
When it comes to grief, however, there is no helpful
neighbor to clear it away…
I have learned that if we are to heal we cannot skirt the
outside edges of our grief. Instead, we must journey all through it, sometimes
meandering the side roads, sometimes plowing directly into its raw center, Alan
D. Wolfelt, PhD
So, while acknowledging that the grief at our loss will
never go away, it is indeed becoming less painful. The center is becoming a
little less raw.
And this year, on December 13, the sadness was
balanced a bit by my being able to share the joy of someone I love very much
who was finally able to get married, to her companion of 26 years, in a happy celebration
surrounded by her daughters and grandchildren and friends.
Being a conservative
Christian and a political liberal often sets up a conundrum, and for me this is
one of those occasions. I cannot set aside what I know the Bible says, but given
that the situation with her is what it is, I am also so pleased for her that
she now has the legal protections that everyone else is given under the law.
