2011 Christmas Eve

A profound sense of emotion brought on by the death of someone dear to me, haunts me this Christmas Eve. It would be easy to turn back fifteen months and look at myself standing graveside with a small group of mourners, blame that one moment in time for how I feel. It would also be wrong.

My wife suffers from losing her mother and, too, watching, feeling helpless about the silent intensity of her father’s pain. He moves through his days with an effort weighed down by his personal suffering and loss.

My oldest daughter suffers from losing her boyfriend to a single rash act, a moment in her life so pivotal as to be staggering in its profundity.

This Christmas Eve, it seems to me, moments of the past strung together like bitter pearls of minutes of missed opportunity slowly steal the future, or, at least, tarnish the possible shine of a new day with the anger they bear with them. The mirror of images viewed so frequently becomes smeared with regret and what is then seen instead appears more like a future filled with sorrow than a chance for life’s opportunity and joys, the past a cocoon of comfort, not a smothering haven of mixed and faded memories.

Now I am not one to stare into crystal balls, or read cards spread across a tabletop. I do not attempt to convince myself that a miracle awaits around corners where demons hide to deter access. I do not believe in the simplicity of answers born from the misery of the past, or of the pretension that if I do nothing but seek solace in the errors I once made, I will somehow find the key to changing the indelible truth of it all.

Honestly, I am not sure there is such a truth, but do know the past is irrefutable. I suppose the more I stare backwards the more I see, but also see less of what was and more of what I wish could have been. Perhaps that is the way we hope to change our failures instead of learning and applying that to how we live now.

Pain seems to be more attractive, drawing us into its inescapable spiderweb of tangled horror, than the pleasure drawn from possibility is.

I do not believe that life must make some kind of rational sense, that loss stops the flow of what is good like the love surrounding me. I do not want to or need to stifle the mystery of it all. Sure pain and loss stagger me, but if that is what we live for, a reaction to that which overwhelms, instead of trying to enjoy all that remains, then I can only wonder how any person finds any joy in today, Christmas Eve.