Finding Joy in the Season of Light and Dark…
Sparkling new ideas this time of year are hard to find. But in the newspaper this morning, columnist Chris Erskine lighted up the page. Chris writes a column called MIDDLE AGES. He shares his life as a dad, husband, sports lover, gardener…you get the drift.
At the beginning of this year, his eldest son died in a car accident. I wept when I read his column about that loss. THE MAN CAN WRITE.
Then at Thanksgiving (we’re talking weeks ago) his wife died. Her cancer had reoccured and so here he was this morning, with another personal column published in the paper. HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
His headline: GRIEF AND JOY CAN SURGE ALONG THE SAME CHANNEL.
And yes, we can all identify with that. Everyone of us can pull from our calendar of the last 357 or so days of this year–events, hours, days, maybe weeks that were hard, challenging, frightening or that just plain sucked. It’s called LIFE.
But I mention Chris and his column because of his strength and outlook. He is left to raise his other son, the one he always refers to as the “little guy” who I believe is in the middle grades–and also to care for a 300 pound beagle, a house and a garden.
His incredible take on the light and dark of his situation flies off the page:
“..I keep thinking of something William Hurt once said. ‘If you cut off the capacity for grief in your life, you cut off the joy at the same time. They both come up through the same tunnel.'” Chris’s reaction to that: GRIEVE, DANCE.
Then he writes: “For the record I quit drinking on Tuesday, started again on Wednesday, quit on Thursday, and so on.” He thanks the folks who keep bringing bottles of “hooch” remarking that they must think he’s stuck in a snowdrift and can’t get out. YES. Momentarily he is.
And so is the “little guy” who gets sick a few days after his mother is buried, his first illness without her. They watch a Clint Eastwood film to get the little guy through and Chris decides that in some way he’s Eastwood and his son is the sidekick that always shows up in an Eastwood film to save the day. “That’s kind of how I see me and the little guy, I’ve got his back, he has mine. Together we’ll slay every evil. I mean, we’ve already seen a few.”
YES THEY HAVE. He mentions that he has opened so many sympathy cards that he has paper cuts up and down his hands. But in true Chris fashion, he writes: “I guess grief is lots of invisible little cuts.”
SO WHAT ARE WE THINKING HERE?
When the holidays return every December, we pull things out of the darkness: boxes of ornaments dusty from an attic or basement; a list of people we want to call friends, but aren’t sure if the passage of time has changed that; and always memories–some that flash and shine and make us smile, others that might embarrass (when I cried my first Christmas married to my husband because there was no gift for me under the tree–Be forgiving, Beth, your father-in-law already has eleven children!” ) And of course others that might fill us with sorrow–my mother is gone now since 2013, and I’m living away from the familiarity of Chicago, from some family, many friends and the blaze of Christmas lights against trees and lawns covered with snow.
But we breathe and say THANK YOU and make new memories in new places and look into photo albums or admire a music box or an ornament that brings back those other years.
Chris finally writes: “Nothing’s perfect. Not this house. Not this family. Not this Christmas. Not without her, certainly. And not without our wickedly funny late son. So I guess we’re pretty much all newborns this season, our tears dripping like tinsel.
But those cuts on my hands? The paper cuts remind me of some greater gifts–family and amazing friends. And the wails of newborns? OUR HEARTACHE, OUR CHRISTMAS HYMN.”
See? I told you he could write!
FINAL COMMENT? You might spend some time thinking about winter–how the days are shorter, darker. How we lean toward light either those on trees or burning in a fireplace, or those in the eyes of the ones we love. Because life is always light and darkness–but as humans, and especially now, during this season, WE ARE DRAWN TO THE LIGHT.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year–and have a warm Winter Solstice.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
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