Grief's gift of pain

Christmas is a time for reflecting on how much we've been given and being thankful for what we have.  To those who have suffered the loss of a loved partner, Christmas holds us to a hard standard.

When your loved one is gone, they are beyond the reach of your gifts and your thoughts of them are a reminder of loss. Christians celebrate the season as the time when God gave humanity the gift of becoming fully whole. But this first Christmas, I am not whole and have no view ahead of an emotional horizon in which I am able to foresee ever being whole again. I'm told this will pass, but this year, the horizon all around is uphill.

Thinking back about how I got to where I am, my memories are bittersweet. How can I be sad that Cynthia died? I was at her side for the entire journey.  Cancer had ravaged her.  She had been robbed of the use of her legs. She was in pain.  In her last 48 hours, she struggled to breathe.  I cleaned the mucus from her mouth with a small wet sponge on a stick and gave her morphine. She had stopped sipping even water. 

Her eyes told me everything I ever needed to know about her love and that she was readying herself for her final journey.  She saw her parents in the room, who were waiting on the other side.  For someone who had loved life so fiercely, how can you condemn them to suffer longer?  You carry them to the end, you hold their hand in dying, you recognize they are in a better place, and their going rips you apart.  Bereft, I remember how much she taught me. She had so much courage, so much passion. She was elemental. Bereavement is a polite word that paints a veneer of respectability on the wound that death of a loved one leaves.  But its old English roots better tell its forgotten truth.  To 'reave' is to raid and plunder, to rob with force and with sword and with axe. Death is the reaver, leaving grief in its wake.

Grief is a heavy burden. Some days it's hard to get out of bed. Some days it's hard to go to bed. It is a weight added to all the usual things we do that previously took no effort at all.  But having nursed a dying person and held their hand with love as they crossed over, life calls us to living, not to wallowing.  Cynthia's life, how she lived it in the long shadow her cancer cast, is a reminder to experience each and every one of our breaths, all of our time, as something precious. We have the gift of life; we have a responsibility to live it fully.  So I have tried to bend my back to this burden, to push on it. To feel the pain fully.  It is the reflection of the love we had.  My memories are of a look in her eye, the way she walked, the sureness with which she placed a seed in the ground and covered it over, in her cooking, her ferocious research of things that interested her, her intelligence, how she smelled up close, the feel of her body next to mine, or holding her hand. All of them are raw.

Grief is a heavy burden, but it will build muscle if you do the reps. The gift of grief is that it forces you to feel. If you never knew how much you loved, you discover your capacity for emotion in grief.  It has flayed my emotional skin so that I feel the light breeze of pleasure at a beautiful sunset; I feel my smile when crows are the busybodies of the back yard hunting bugs in the morning; or I feel the satisfaction of seeing a strewn lawn turned into piles of pine straw raked up and ready for mulching beds. When a memory becomes a round, smooth stone inside my chest trying to burst through my skin and my eyes run with tears, denying that I have been plundered is foolish. Wisdom is learning the difficult reflex of embracing the pain at each ambush to transmute it into an emotional honesty that makes me more fully human. This pain has better let me see and know the pain others are feeling.  This pain makes me more sensitive to loss of all kinds that others experience.

Grief is a heavy burden, but this pain lets the tears run from my eyes when others are hurting and need their pain acknowledged without saying a word. This pain is a gift that tells me how alive I am and what a privilege that is. This pain is a lesson when I feel anger at the idiot in the car in front of me who won't use his indicators that life is too important to waste anger on a beautiful day.  Grief is a gift that tells me to stop being a sissy and to embrace life nakedly, without barriers. 

I am bereft, but it is a gift. Thank you, my love, for your gift to me, this Christmas.

Header Image - Statue of our back garden, with freshly-planted bulbs.