Christmas Eve Heart Opening 2021

It’s Christmas Eve…Joan Didion passed away yesterday, so I have been listening to the audiobook version of The Year of Magical Thinking as I strung beads. Black beads mixed with green aventurine and a few jasper pieces stung onto black thread and connected with a heart chakra symbol. My thoughts have been on life and death and love. How love brings up a fear of death that makes it unbearable to consider. I think of my sons and how much I love them, which triggers the fear of their death. The idea of losing them, but also the idea of their suffering. Of the impermanence of it all. 

I woke up to a phone call from Roxanne this morning. She had dreamed of her Mom and Dad. I had seen my Mom and Grandmother in my hypnogogic images before sleep arrived last night. This holiday season it feels more palpable that I am fully alone now. That all my childhood memories of Christmas no longer exist in anyone but me. This is a curse of being an only child I think. No sibling exists that can hold on to precious family moments with you. I have no one left to reminisce with and no it is up to me to just hold them alone. How lucky I really was at that tiny little house on Roberts Ave in Lynchburg, Virginia. How fleeting it all really is. 

Love has been a part of my life harder to understand. Death for some reason seemed the easier of the two to work with. It seemed more tangible. More able to accept. Not that I have seen love. I have seen it and been given access so freely. I was so loved as a child that occasionally I feel guilty. My family really loved me and I never felt unsure of that at all. I took it for granted often, but I never questioned whether I was loved. Not one bit. Not the way I have seen friends have to work through and still recover from. 

My parents may not have ever really loved one another in a romantic way, but they cared for each other. They took care of the life they built for me together. And then there was Sam. 

Sam was the embodiment of love to me. He was my Mom’s first husband. When they separated Sam rented a room from my Grandmother. He never left. He became like an uncle to me. He was my Dad’s best friend for a while. He helped take care of my Granny and managed all the home maintenance and such for her. Sam loved my Mom his whole life. He was there always. 

To me he was magic. He built snowmen with me without gloves on. His laugh was infectious. He was childlike in his approach to life. And Sam was a really broken person. Vietnam had destroyed him. He had seen his best friend blown up in front of him and witnessed so much death. Mom had told me that his suffering from the war had been what destroyed their relationship. It had driven him to alcoholism. 

I have a cat named Sam now…

My sons haven’t had the magical love I had growing up. I was poor and we struggled a lot. There were periods I remember my Mom going to work extra jobs and she was only maybe getting 4 hours of sleep a night. My Dad often had extra jobs too. But what we had didn’t matter. I didn’t notice what we didn’t have because I was so loved. 

Thinking through how I hold all these memories of moments now I realize how they are also strung together with other people. People who were in my life for a season or two. But they make up scenes in my memory landscape. My middle school best friend, Brandy, and how her family use to make peppermint milkshakes around the holiday. I hunted down all the stuff for peppermint milkshakes to give my sons tonight. 

Memories of college friends, first Christmas away from home. Working at Shockoe Espresso on Christmas Eve when I lived in Richmond and the guy who told us all about Hanukkah. My first husband’s family and how welcome they made me at the weird Christmas in Florida. My step mom and her family coming to stay with me when I was pregnant with Oliver in Kansas City. Advice from Travis’s Granny about how to just sit down and give men things to do because they needed to feel useful. The friend’s my parent would have over on Christmas Eve when I was little who loved to eat olives out of a jar. 

People have no idea how they are connection points in our memories. We have no idea who thinks of us in this way. All these little knots and ties that hold us together. Love is so much bigger than I have been able to really comprehend. 

I’ve spent a lot of my life working out my relationship with Death. Not that it is easy, but it has been important and necessary for me. For all the loss and my own mortality and all that. Death has pointed me to really consider Love now. To try to really know Love and accept the enormity of what that really is. No need to wait for Death to appreciate the Love that is right here in every moment. With everyone and everything, we are in this. And it is messy and scary and so uncomfortable. Love reminds us…just as Death does…we are not who we think we are. 

The real work we all have to do is in the heart. It is about our own connection and ability to love and care…even as we sit with Death and the impermanence of all of this. Love it all. Love is all and it will love you too. Open the gate and let it all in. That is my work right now. As I go back to stringing these beads together for the heart chakra…I am aware that this energy is alive in this moment…and it brings me lots of tears. Death seems to point me to celebrating love so much more than remembering loss.