Sally Huggins Toner

We are all grieving.

I know that some of you, maybe many, will stop reading this post after the first sentence. I totally get it. There is only so much bandwidth available in an average soul for all that’s been bad about this year–all that’s been lost. I could commiserate with a list of the individual sadness and pain those I hold dearest have felt in 2020. But every one of us has our own list, and it’s not a contest. If you’re still reading, then rest assured that grief is only half of this story.

“It’s okay to feel a little sad,” our oldest texted from five states away this morning. I appreciate the permission. I believe that’s the first thing to get out of the way. So many lights in the neighborhood, literally bursting at the seams with baked goods and carols and fa la la la la. I think we (and I keep using that collective pronoun) proclaimed sometime after Halloween that we were going to go all in with the holidays, tune to WASH FM 24 hr. Christmas music even earlier, be as festive as F–OR ELSE… After all, what else were we going to do, stuck in our houses, stuck in our heads, with a gaping hole in our hearts?

“Quit your whining…count your blessings…know how lucky you are!” I can hear my grandmother telling me now. “Do something useful.” Yes, Meemaw, you’re right. Whining’s for chumps. I am healthy. I have a warm house, warm food, people (and a really sweet fat Russian Blue, thanks to some friends) to hug. But I’m a little sad. And Meemaw, your great granddaughter, a pretty smart cookie, just told me that’s okay. 

I imagine that grief sits on one side of a shoji. The shoji is a wooden door with translucent paper in its frames. It is believed to have come to Japan from China during the seventh or eighth century. I think that on the other side of grief’s shoji sits joy. There isn’t an opaque wall that separates the two. We stand on either side at various times in our lives, but, if we look, we can make out the other. Then, the door slides open, and we step through, only certain that, at some point, we’ll come back again. There is pain, but, through the translucence (you can call it a “glass darkly,” if you want) there is happiness.

And vice versa.

A few days ago, I made a Christmas decoration. I got the idea from a dear friend’s Facebook Post. He just got married yesterday, to a love well deserved and long overdue. His mother took old holiday decorations from his childhood and attached them to a ring of green. So I did the same with a box of ornaments my own  mother gave me a few years back.

I was thinking on our family Zoom tonight that I’d ask everyone for their earliest Christmas memories. Mine is actually the year Mom and I went with Dad up to Maryland to see his parents. They had two dogs, Sissy and Boy, a toy poodle and pomeranian mix respectively. There’s a picture of me smiling in a Christmas coat holding a doll in front of an antique MG (My uncle always was an autophile) with a giant stuffed Santa in the passenger seat. 

It was, in fact, my first Christmas with Dad. See, he wasn’t my dad, yet. But he and Mom would marry, he’d adopt me, they’d have my sisters, and so many beautiful Christmases after that. So many beautiful Christmases to come.

Back to the box of decorations and the wreath I made. The story goes that the first Christmas my mother and birth father were married, they lived on base and realized, when they bought a tree, that they had no ornaments. So they decided to throw a crafting party to make some. There were styrofoam balls covered in satin, bejewels before bejewels were cool. Quite a bit of Johnny Walker, I imagine.

Every year, I enjoyed putting the cockeyed ornaments on our tree, and Mom decided a few years back it was my turn to have them. This year, with a smaller tree of our own, I decided that they needed a more individual and permanent showcase. So the wreath idea was perfect. It hangs in our den as I write this, and I can’t help but consider the fun they had at that party. Mom would have one more Christmas with my father. I would have none. He was killed in an F4 when I was four months old.

I don’t tell that story to make anyone sad. Although, remember, it’s okay to be. I tell that story because I  can imagine the joy the two of them felt during their last Christmas together, expecting their first child. And I can imagine that the Christmas of 1970, when it was just my mother and me, she never imagined the joy to come. Or maybe she did.

Shoji.

Here’s where I’m going to get a bit Biblical. I don’t consider myself a particularly religious person. But I’d like to think I am a person of faith, and my Catholic school upbringing equipped me with a working knowledge of scripture. As a writer, the pauses in the Gospel are what have always stuck with me–the moments of quiet, reflection, and yes, sometimes grief. One of those pauses comes in the Christmas story itself:

From Luke 2, Verses 17-18

When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

What was she thinking, I always wondered. It occurs to me she wasn’t just caught in the brilliance of the moment, the joy of holding her son for the first time. If Mary listened to the angel, if she had the line in on the grand plan, then she knew, from that first moment, how the story would go. She knew even then that she would have to bury her son. There is no greater grief than that.

It also wasn’t the end of the story.

Shoji.

My wish for the world tonight is vision through that pane of paper. May we give each other grace, comfort, and love today and always. I’ll end with the final verse of one of my favorite carols, (I’ll take some liberties with the pronouns and address it to y’all.) It’s by Christina Rossetti. I absolutely love the tune, but I remember the Christmas my piano teacher made me stop and read the last stanza. 

“Isn’t that just beautiful?” she asked after I had.

“Yes, it is.”

From “In the Bleak Midwinter”

What can I give you, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give you: give my heart.