Does Heaven Do Christmas?

Hope After a Crappy Year

The grief angel keeps knocking at my door. I ignore it, but it won’t go away—darkness thinks time is on its side. It waits until I’m off-balance, unwrapping new hopes for the coming year. Then grief pounces, and somehow, I never see it coming.

Caught unawares, I’m served with an order to plumb deeper into my loss, myself. I’m left wondering if heaven is real, and if so, do they have any fresh hope to spare?

I know a few people who sure could use some.

To anyone who’s missing a loved one this season, celebrating the holidays can feel like cruel and unusual punishment.

Recently, one of my grown sons asked me for a hug. His eyes were red from crying; his voice trembled with quiet agony. “I miss Dad so much,” he said. We held each other for a long moment.

I seem to have nothing but dry tears. My husband’s death last December ninth made for a frantic, yet numbing holiday. Like many who’ve lost loved ones, I skated blindfolded through the whole season. Too many arrangements and papers to sign kept grief in limbo, something for another, more convenient time.

I couldn’t even cry at his military honors funeral service. When the Marine blew “Taps,” I came close, but by then I was too exhausted to break down. This year, it all feels new and raw and way too real. I’m on my own, and it’s like bungee jumping over a bottomless cliff.

Still dry-eyed, on this Third Day of Christmas I’m feeling my way back to hope after a really crappy year. A year of missing my Marine, of adjusting to my new widow-weedsy place in the world, of wrestling with faith and that grief angel who won’t quit bugging me. A year of discomfort with where and who I am now.

I can’t seem to find hope in what made a younger me chase happiness that was only found in things outside myself. Achieving and accumulating seem pointless now. Instead, I’m pulled deeper and deeper into what I can only describe as love. Love for others, love for God, love for my imperfect self—a tractor beam streaming my very atoms into the mystery.

When I ask myself why I feel compelled to excavate the deep end of my heart, I give the same answer I’ve had since girlhood. Connection. Connecting with everyone and everything drives me the same way I once wanted lesser things with so much passion.

My dreams were broken the same way your aspirations have too often been snuffed out. Our losses are as painful as childbirth, as dreaded as root canals. Death cuts our souls to the bone.

We belong to a circle of unspeakable terror and terrible beauty.

We worry about the ones still here, about our own mortality. After my Marine’s passing I thought I couldn’t go on. I panicked that the end of my forty-seven-year marriage meant the end of connection. The end of belonging. The end of hope, that somehow darkness had overcome the light.

What I couldn’t fathom was how calamity and death prepared the way for a new beginning. Prepared me for light and love and new hope hiding behind the approaching dawn. Mistaken in thinking grief was punishment, I was lost.

But then, one night I saw it.

I was walking, head down, heart as cold as my fingers. My breath caught and my eyes stung.

I stopped and beheld connection again.

There, in the fractals of the old cedar’s branches. Dazzling beauty that only shouted God made this! The giant tree’s insistence that we’re connected. I reached up on tiptoe to brush the lowest-hanging needles. She whispered back. Look up, see that silver tinge bleeding into the sullen sky?

All the stars stopped, standing over the birthplace of light from eons ago, radiating the slimmest hope that only those with wounded hearts perceive. Peace swooped in from out of nowhere, from everywhere all at once. Cosmos singing like angels. A breeze rustled the cedar’s headdress. Swollen boughs of tears glittered the earthen bowl.

With her tears on my cheeks, I sank to my knees in awe and wonder.

You’re connected. We’re connected. We belong to a circle of unspeakable terror and terrible beauty. Endings show us beginnings. Beginnings of new hope to help us get through today.

After this crappy year, I finally understand. Nothing and no one can save us from our sorrows. Life has troubles—lots of them, if you hadn’t noticed. Yet as awful and painful as they are, our sufferings are portals to beginnings. On the precipice we’re invited to step into possibility, to a love that leads us out of darkness again.

Just ahead, we glimpse the kind of battle-tested possibility that even the weariest soul sees. Whether you see it in the birth of a poor, brown baby come to save us or you’re content to witness the dark slowly turning to light, the broken hallelujah bursts through our tragedies, our dashed dreams, our lack of peace.

When that dang grief angel comes knocking again, I won’t turn her away. For all the days I’ve stayed dry-eyed, I’m learning. Seeing. Understanding. Beneath grief’s tattered wings, the shimmer of tears from heavenly cedars embraces us all as beloved children.

Yes, heaven does do Christmas. Every open heart shouts peace on earth, goodwill toward all. May your days be filled with light, love and connection.