The death of a beloved is an amputation.
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
There’s a 10-foot tall Christmas tree in Tustin, California for families who grieve the loss of their children to addiction. It’s put there yearly by Solace of Hope, a family support group for grieving parents. The tree is filled with ornaments and photos of the many lives lost far too soon to the damnable plague of opioids.
Alan Berkowitz and his wife Kathy lost their 26-year old son to heroin six years ago.
The toughest part for my wife and me is Christmas morning. Now it’s just the two of us. We get up and have coffee. And, well, it’s kind of hollow.”
Sandy and I share that isolating grief with the Berkowitz’s. Our Graham also became an ‘ornament on a tree’ nine Christmases ago at twenty-four. He had just completed a few months in rehab and we were happily working on getting him a flight home from Minnesota. On December 16th, word reached us he would not be coming home.
Our Christmases can still feel hollow for us too. More’s the pity because Sandy loves Christmas like no other day of the year. She can decorate to beat the band and transform any house or apartment into a glowing hearthfire of peace on earth. Fittingly, she’s a Christmas Day baby, but each year her birthday is eclipsed by a lingering shadow of grief.
I was streaming the first episode of a murder mystery which was mostly meh until the chief detective said something I immediately put in my notes app. Offering comfort to the victim’s teenage daughter he said,
“grief is love with no place to go.”
For parents like us who have lost a child at Christmas, we totally get that.
While many associate Christmas with “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,” (even better in Linus voice) others are further down in the Luke narrative. There’s the headline we all know and love, but then there’s the fine print:
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (AND A SWORD WILL PIERCE THROUGH YOUR OWN SOUL ALSO), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.
Luke 2:34-35 (emphasis mine)
Way to bury the lede, Luke!
Years ago many older hymns were passed down through oral/auditory tradition. The First Noel is one of them, which is why The Cornish Songbook (1929), printed the first stanza as:
O well, O well, the Angels did say
To shepherds there in the fields did lay;
Late in the night a-folding their sheep,
A winter’s night, both cold and bleak.
O well, O well, O well, O well,
Born is the King of Israel.
The season of noël is, for some, a painful ordeal. From the Latin ‘natale,’ meaning “birth,” Noël feels like anything but.
For a myriad of reasons, not only loss, it instills dread and invites depression. Scrooge’s dark night of the soul resonates more deeply than his Christmas morning grace awakening in some.
His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom
—Aragorn, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien
Sandy and I fight the good fight yearly to not get cheated out of Christmas. She still decorates and I still play the music. She wraps gifts in upscale department store fashion and I don’t. We make sure to see the lights, watch White Christmas, and sit graveside with our boy on Christmas Eve.
The two of us have found our safest place to be is with each other. We don’t do big family gatherings on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We prefer our holidays quieter. It’s worked for us nine straight years and we don’t plan to change.
If the manger means anything, it means the Savior swaddles our sorrows. Slowly, over channels of time, the comforted begin to realize their bandwidth for moving through the hard days has increased. The sword pierces a little less. You can surprise yourself by having the wherewithal to do stuff again.
Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, our Wisdom from heaven, has gifted us with a deeper Noël. Even in the midst of our bleak midwinter, and as a hurting world moans in unrequited protest, our grief becomes love that suddenly finds a place to go.
Joyeux Noël, beloved.
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