Before the clock rolled over to December 26th, she was reliant on a ventilator. Less than two weeks later, she was gone.
It took me years to not feel overrun by the hostility of being cheated by hope. It still burns. I still clamor and stumble in darkness to see past the injustice of someone who had fought so hard to live through chronic health conditions being taken down by the unstoppable swift end to pancreatic cancer.
Christmas in my heart has been branded with the insignia of death. The season is painful. The sights, the sounds and the merriment all remind me of a time when I was watching the life leave someone. The time when I was a helpless bystander in a confusing and bewildering drama.
The Christmas season that year was the end of so many things.
It was the end of my mother's life. It was the end to her pain and struggling. It was the end to Christmas past and my childhood traditions. It was the end of a chaotic normal. The fire that kindled the last innocence I had remaining slowly diminished. And died. Innocence ended.
It was the year almost everything changed. Definitions of family, home and hope were all rewritten. My understanding of how to live happy and whole changed.
That Christmas changed me. I now experience the season with both the wonder of a child and the sting of a wounded heart. There's the pain of an empty chair as new laughter lingers in the air. At times the emotions overtake me in tsunami-like deluges. Other times, the pain is the forces that freezes, stills and numbs. And what I have come
to know through the journey from hospice room to the manger to this day, is that change is the ultimate gift of Christmas.
Christmas is God changing form and coming to us in a relatable reality. God's love didn't change, but the way it was able to be experienced did. Love came closer to us, in the form of one of us, to offer us a transforming relationship.
It's that relationship that changes what the future can look like. It's the one that says love still lives in a way you are able to feel it. It's the promise that God is vast, constant and ever present. It's that knowing that God's love is without end even when it takes on unfamiliar forms.
It's that Unfamiliar yet familiar love that beckons us to embrace the changing force
of Love. The love that changes fear to hope, death to life, impossibility to possible changes our relationship with that love and with each other.
Change is a dynamic force.
Change is hard even when rooted in Love. Change is painful even though it is needed. Change is unpredictable even when predicted.
Four years ago, in a corner ICU room, God was working to bring life to both heartbeats in ways that could not fully be understood in that time and space. Many of those changes are still living on in holy mystery.
I anchor my spirit in the knowledge that God lives and breathes in change. God changes forms. God changes lives. Change is making all things new. So be it
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