“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill

Heard that quote at a “Surviving the Holidays” webinar I attended last night. I had written it down and it was the first thing I saw this morning as I sat down at my desk. I always learn something from these grief webinars, having been to the national conference and being able to put  faces and names together, makes it all that more personal. I have “met” their children, heard their stories, and there is a bond of trust, I have seen their scars.

Through the interactive feature of the webinar, I was able to type in a question that had been stirring in me. This is our fourth Christmas without Justin and I am mostly dead to the season this year. Our first Christmas was only 12 weeks after Justin’s death, we were still in shock. If you listen to the outside world enough, you begin to doubt your journey, begin to doubt if you are making any progress, in short, you wonder if you are “doing it wrong.”

So the question I posed was basically this, the holidays are only getting worse, we haven’t pulled the Christmas boxes out since his death, what do we do? The power of someone using your name and responding to your question with compassion. Their response? “Moving through grief feels worse.”  If the pain is intensifying, it means you are moving through it, reality continues to set in and the permanence of that reality is hard to bear. The relief I felt, what we are experiencing is normal. One panel member shared that the five year mark was just brutal for him, that it took years to feel joy and find a new normal for the holidays.

And that is when Winston Churchill was quoted “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Perhaps an odd quote to grasp as my holiday thought, but it woke me up at 4:30 this morning, my feet hit the floor, I waded through cats, stepped over the dog, and started coffee. The panel spoke of the outside world intellectualizing grief, spiritualizing grief, telling us that our loved ones would want us to enjoy Christmas. I have thought on that idea all night. I will struggle to put into words what I am trying to wrap my head around. The heart cannot be boxed, the heart cannot be simply intellectualized. I woke up thinking of Psalm 57, …my heart, O God, is ready, some translations say “steadfast.”  The Psalmist is declaring that his heart is ready, could that not mean that at an earlier time his heart was not ready? Yes?  The greatest distance in life is between our head and our heart, it may be all of 18 inches if that, but it is a journey none the less. And it is an honorable journey, people should not be chided for the length of their journey, or the darkness of their journey.  In the movie “The Passion of the Christ”, there is some artistic license taken, but I see in my mind, Christ gripping his cross, saying “My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready.” If God was small enough to fit in a manger, humble enough to become human, patient enough to be prepared for thirty-three years for an excruciating death and bear the profound sorrow and horror of the evil of man, then is He not big enough to wait for my heart to be ready to live again?  If God is outside of time, than this time of quest, of doubt, the absence of joy, is not wearying His patience with me at all. And if God is not impatient, then why should it matter what anyone else thinks?

Grief is work and there are a lot of tasks to grieving, the holidays just seem to add an extra burden to the work. The panel suggested to not be afraid to try different things until you find a new normal, some things won’t work, some will, what worked once, may not work a second time. We aren’t decorating this year, we are not “doing” a tree, and that is okay. November, December, not the months to pull out the Christmas boxes. No, those trigger boxes can come down in July, when the sun is bright and the days long, that was my thought this morning. The boxes need to be sorted and organized, there are hand painted ornaments that my mother painted for Justin, there is “Baby’s First Christmas”, how can people expect us to even look at those things, much less touch them, and hold them. What if they break, what if the pain won’t subside, so we wait.  Our hearts are not ready and there is wisdom in acknowledging that reality.

So with a new understanding of Churchill’s quote, “If you’re going through hell, keep going”, and a renewed confidence that we are grieving quite normally, we will take each day leading up to Christmas as it comes, we can only do one moment at time. I have thrown out more cookie dough than I have baked this year, I cannot figure out where I screwed up so bad. I can make cookies with my eyes closed, maybe mine were. But they are open now, for I do not believe my heart was in those cookies, just my head, and they turned out tasteless, no flavor, lacking that something extra. I am sorry for the loss of expensive ingredients, but I discerned a powerful lesson, I must follow my heart. To settle for anything less will result just like that cookie, savorless, and bland.

Wishing everyone a peace filled season, whatever your beliefs, may you be true to your heart.