It is early December, and the rain has settled in. The skies are gray and memories of Christmas past easily slide into my thoughts. They catch me in unsuspecting places. Yesterday I was driving down a familiar street in our town and suddenly I remembered something my sister and I talked about, something we asked one another each Christmas season…”Have you put up your tree?” Such a simple and innocent collection of ordinary words spoken on an ordinary day, but she isn’t here anymore, I cannot ask anymore, and my heart was pierced with loneliness…just the sudden memory of that simple question on the end of a phone line asked year after year filled my eyes with tears and my heart seemed to break.
I cried, I always cry. I never resist those emotions. I believe their unexpected appearance is a natural manifestation that brings me to the intensity that is loss, so I cry. I wallow in it for a time; I go with it, intentionally gathering a collection of thoughts, a collection of our conversations, of our good times together, of our special relationship that was sisters.
I saturate my heart with her…never resisting, for these times are somehow someway, ‘gifts’. It becomes a purposeful time set aside just for her and although my eyes are flooded with tears, comfort eventually emerges.
Anyway, today is still rainy and gray, but the fragments of my broken heart are, happily, back together; the wonderful season of another Christmas is here. This Christmas will, naturally, be unlike all the others bringing with it special experiences, experiences that will become Christmas past.
With an assortment of nearly 70 Christmases and an ordinary life filled with love and loss, heartache and joy, and all the pairings of a broad range of emotions, I enter the season with energy and hope to make it a Christmas that will, one day, make me cry with tears of joy…
Comments