On Grieving in Advent

FullSizeRender.jpg

I am feeling a grief that I have only felt a few times in my adult life. It is a grief that demands to be felt, which is perhaps why it is so raw and real and rare. I cannot choke it down, it does not fit in any box that I could carefully construct. No box of friends, movies, shopping, Twitter, wine - none of my old complicit pals will hold this for me.

 

It is mine to bear. I lay in bed, blinking tears, and I feel it. That it the only way I can describe it - I feel it in my fingers and my toes, which I clinch and release in a quiet rhythm that I hope will distract me, but it doesn’t.

 

My grief is dancing with anxiety - they make lovely partners, waltzing through my head and stepping in time with the rhythms of my sped-up heartbeat.

 

I feel like a rubber band stretched as far as possible, but who can’t snap back - I hold only tension, spring-loaded grief and fear. I think a lot about the night Julia was born, when I had nothing to save me but guttural screams - I let everything go, let it spill out of me like a waterfall. It was the most free I have ever felt, in the midst of the most intense pain - because I had nothing to slow it down, to stop it, to distract me. I had to sit in my physical pain and experience it fully, embodied, incarnate.

 

The end of something beautiful and precious demands the same presence, but I don’t know how to give it. When you love your work - the work of my head and my hands, the work I do with the people I love - it becomes part of you. When it’s work you’ve done for almost a decade, it seems impossible to begin to untangle it from your identity. I want to scream - I want to go out into a dark night and scream with all the painful abandon I felt the night Julia came; and yet, I can’t. Because I can’t summon that abandon, that freedom.

 

Instead I have to sit in this foreign and familiar grief; I have to greet it in the morning and fight it as I fall asleep at night. And like all grief and sadness, it will fade. I know it will. But it is hard, and it hurts.

 

This Advent season has held me, limping along, with the promise of an Incarnate Savior who meets this embodied pain. It is the beauty of Christianity, the Word made flesh to dwell among us.

 

I don’t know how to make the pain go away. I don’t know how to cure the cancer, or stop the migraines, or bring the baby back, or heal the relationship, or find the way out of the crushing darkness of depression.

 

But I know that Jesus came incarnate to feel the same pain - and to reveal the Promise that one day, it will be gone forever. Our embodied pain needs an incarnate Savior. It is our only hope in life and death. And it is all I have.

 

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” -John 1:4-5

Melanie R.Comment