Advent & Tears

Well, Advent’s nearly here, and it will be a miracle if I get to in one piece.

It’s been a rough month, I told someone recently, and realized I had been saying the same thing for eight months, which explained the sense I have, perpetually, of having been recently hit by a car.  I am tired, frustrated, depleted, grouchy, sad, irritable—and whether I feel all of these things in succession or all at once depends on the whim of the moment.

That’s not to say there aren’t causes.

My husband and I have been joking this year about “forties soreness.”  Back in our twenties and thirties, when we exercised, we sometimes woke up the next day with sore muscles.  You stretched out the kinks, and went about your business.  In our forties, we’ve found, it happens differently: you exercise, a day goes by, and then the next day you open your eyes in bed and find you’re unable to move.

Grief is a little like that.

My first Christmas without Mom wasn’t as upsetting as I’d anticipated, at the time, that it would be.  Strange, yes, uncertain, bittersweet: but full of love, and we all managed.  Looking back, I realize we were all probably still in shock and stumbling through.  A year later, the sadness is showing.

The Christmas I used to have and to love—the Christmas that made me love Christmases—is gone, now, in a way that I didn’t expect it to be gone.  I somehow thought I’d lose the person, but not the traditions—and yet without the person, the traditions, too, have eternally changed or been lost.  My Dad is coping by not caring about Christmas much at all, and somehow that leaves me even more bereft.

Of course, just over a year out from my mother’s death, the rest of the world expects me to have gone on.

So there’s this weird new unexpected “first Christmas” without Mom grief, even though it isn’t; and all the demands of Christmas, which were put on hold for the period of initial mourning but have now descended thick and fast; and then there’s…well, everything else.

Finding my footing in a new world where I am my father’s source of….well, everything meaningful.  Struggling to keep standing against wave after wave of work drama and work stress and a workload so staggering, temporarily, that I burst into tears sitting down at my computer recently.  Family expectations around holiday visits.  Expectations, in general, that I always be my typical happy, cheerful self.  Friends dumping all their feelings about their own lives in my general direction.  People being unintentionally, accidentally, thoughtless.  A thousand pressures and stresses.

Draw boundaries, people tell me.  Make some time for yourself!

With what energy?

A long time ago, I had the unfortunate honor of being on a plane that landed in a windstorm with gusts so intense we saw news warnings about them.  The plane landed like it was made of paper, swooping and dipping, tremulous, up-and-then-down-and-up-and-were-we-going-to-make-it?  Even when the wheels hit the runway, the whole plane juddered as though the wind might lift it back up into the sky.  I remember pressing myself down in my seat, my heels hard against the floor as though I could persuade it with my body weight to stay on the ground.

I’m coming into Advent like that plane—swoops and bumps and dips and tilts, barely able to land.

A friend suggested a Blue Christmas to me: the service our church does for those in mourning or who are bereaved, for people who don’t feel like a traditional “merry” Christmas.  I don’t have a problem with the service or with those who want to attend it, but I resist it myself strenuously.  This is because I want the complexity of my feeling to be present in Advent.  I want it to be present to me, and I want it to be present to others.  I think it’s vital for it to be present to others.

When I was a child, my favorite event was the candlelight cantata at our church.  Quite frankly, I liked it for a) the good mood of the congregants, b) the most excellent buffet of appetizers we shared after, and c) the Christmas carols we sang.  I liked the candlelight service, but it always made me a little uncomfortable, too: before our church passed out candles to the members present, they allowed congregants to light candles for those who had died and set them, burning, at the front of the church on the altar.

The number of candles grew every year.

And I didn’t know any of those candles, at first, and I never could quite grasp the heavy silence that fell before we all lit our own, when you could just hear ragged, quick-gulp breathing in the silence from those trying not to cry.  My mom always wept openly, tears streaming down, while I shifted next to her and waited to receive my candle.

But over the years, as candles were added, I recognized the names.  Miss Ruby and Joy.  My aunt.  My grandmothers and grandpa.  Another aunt.  A neighbor.  The congregants who gave me peppermints on Sundays, and hugs.  And I started crying, too.

Advent has its own sword.

There is joy, and hope, and peace on earth and goodwill to men.  But that joy and hope and peace is purchased first with death, and then with resurrection.  The cries of the infant Christ echo the cries of children slaughtered (Matt. 2:16-18).  There is joy in the morning, but we endure the weeping, first. The weeping sower returns laughing, bearing his harvest, but he plants in sorrow.

I want the magic and the joy and the brightness of Christmas this year.  I do.  I have festooned my entire house with nativities and lights and trees and wreaths and candles.  I had carols going in November.  I am shouldering a heavy workload now so at the end of the month I can relax and fully enjoy the holiday.  I have my Advent all planned out with activities I hope will put me in a mind of praise and joy. 

But also, I’m going to cry, and feel sad, and I’ll be tired.  And that me—all of me—is the me that God wants present in Advent.  That is the me that God wants present always, good and bad, fully here and fully honest, happy and worshipful and also, sometimes, sort of a mess.

A friend of mine, who lost her mother at almost the same time I did, called me recently.  “Oh,” she said, delighted, on our video call.  “You have Christmas lights up in your office!”  She peered at them twinkling in the background.  “I think you made me want to put mine up.”

She called me back later that week, both of us having had a particularly rough one, and tilted her camera to show me her new additions: a festive tree, a poinsettia, a nativity.  We oohed and aahed over each other’s decorations and celebrated each other’s desire to make an effort—and then we looked at each other, with our smudged mascara and half-finished Diet Cokes, our eye bags and dry skin, and we laughed and cried and then laughed a little and cried some more.

This is us, I thought then.  We are here, for better or for worse.

And that is how God wants us to be present: however we show up and are able, in the fullness of who we are, in whatever position we happen to occupy on the mourning-to-joy scale.  I am here, I think as we head into the Advent season.  I am with you, for better or for worse.  This is what it’s like to be human.

And as Advent approaches, God reminds me: I know, I know.