Sometimes I feel about the holidays like I do about hard times in my life-I just want it to be over. I wrote a blog in May about how holidays expose the tender places in our hearts. I am certainly finding that true this holiday. I am trying to take my own words to heart and receive the gift of God to let grief do its work. The prayer of remembrance below has brought me much comfort.  Some of you are facing your first holiday season without your dear one and some are wondering why even after all this time it is still so painful. I hope these words will bring you some comfort too.

“We remember these, our beloved,
not to be sad, but to remember.
Our sorrow that accompanies their death
does not diminish the joyful gift that was their lives.
We remember their kindness and their nobility and their goodness.
They taught us to live and love, inspiring us through the grace of their best selves.
They have showered us with love and light, and as we remember them,
we bring their light back, to raise up our heavy hearts.
These we remember… ”  Rabbi Jonathan Miller

I fell while camping in August and face planted on an exposed tree root and suffered a concussion. The night it happened I got up put some ice on it, watched my campfire and then climbed in my tent and went to sleep. Definitely not the protocal for a head injury! Over the next several weeks I started to develop troubling  symptoms,  but it took 6 weeks before I could get into the neurologist. I told her I had never experienced symptoms so scary-horrible headaches and overwhelming despair and hopeless. She asked a few questions and pronounced ” you do realize these are all classic symptoms of concussion?”. Well no I did not -I have never had a concussion-I did not understand that at all.

I think grief  is like this-whatever the circumstances -it hits us so powerfully but we may not understand how damaging the blow is. We are numb and just trying to function. We don’t recognize the symptoms of grief seeping in to different areas of our life. My doctor explained to me that concussions are tricky because each person receives their injury to a different part of the brain depending on where they were hit. Grief is that way-it is so personal to each of us. That is reason “I know how you feel” brings little comfort. We each have to heal in our own way and time. Be gentle with yourself during this season -try to show yourself the same tenderness you show to the ones most dear to you.

I think the Divine created our world as a mirror of what we can expect in our life. I always dread the dark short days of fall and winter and when we pass the winter solstice I immediately feel some renewal and hope. We know we can count on the light and our hope returning-but it returns slowly day by day.

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature. The assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter…the bottom may drop out of my life, what I trusted may fall away completely, leaving me astonished and shaken. But still, sticky leaves emerge from bud scales that curl off the tree as the sun crosses the sky. Darkness pools and drains away, as the curve of the new moon points to the place the sun will rise again. There is wild comfort in the cycles and the intersecting circles, the rotations and revolutions, the growing and ebbing of this beautiful and strangely trustworthy world”. (Rachel Carson quoted in WILD COMFORT-The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore)

I moved earlier this year to a new home after being in the same place for 17 years. This house is so much nicer, but I still don’t always know how to answer when people ask me if I am enjoying my  new home. I do-but it still feels a bit unfamiliar. I was home today thinking how dark the dining room area is and then looked over and realized my side door has a window on it. I walked over and opened the blinds and light flooded the room. I thought-that window has been here the whole time just waiting for me to open it and I just did not notice it. Grief can effect us that way too-we may just shut part of our brain down as a coping mechanism. I believe God provides comforting light in our life and sometimes we just can’t see the window waiting to be opened and flood our lives with comfort and hope. Or maybe it is just too soon and we are not ready to receive that light yet-just try to remember that grief is something that takes time. Try to remember when the pain seems unending that there are windows of hope and comfort prepared for you and that at the right  time you will recognize them. Don’t give up -they are there even if you can’t see them now. I hope that as the light returns to the earth it will bring you hope for your heart’s healing. “We remember these, our beloved…”

THE SWAN-Rainer Maria Rilke

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide farther and farther on.

(From-A YEAR WITH RILKE by Joanna Macy)

©  Michelle Campanis 2016 December