December—When The Light Returns

There’s not much left of December as I write this. We saw the red-hazed full moon, winter equinox and total lunar eclipse all on the 21st. This is a one in 300+ year event.

This month the man to whom I was married for over nine years died. We had been divorced for many years and stayed friends over those years. Love never really dies. Just because people grow apart doesn’t have to mean the love that brought them together diminishes.

I will always love him for many reasons one of the biggest is one that I thought at age twenty-three was not necessarily a reason to love him—that reason is the four lovely women who are his children.

We shared much family together my family, parents, brother, niece and nephew and cousins and their children. We have always been a close family sharing vacations, holidays and always “projects” together. We my husband and I merged our families we had a much bigger group and his children and my cousins children as well as the children of one of his best friends all grew up together.

This year Christmas brought phone calls and Christmas cards his children. We asked each other how we were doing on this day, checking out our current level of grief and sharing a story of two together of happier days and of the days to come and how we walk into tomorrow through today. Living one day at a time which is really all we have can be difficult when we are grieving and it takes the ten-year old grandchild who wants to open presents or just that the dog who needs a walk to bring us out of our reverie and back into the present.

My mother-in-law told me after the death of my own father when I was twenty-seven that her own experience of losing her mother thirty years before was that the pain didn’t ever really leave, she was just better able to handle it with time.

She was a wise woman then and I can pass what she told me and what I’ve come to learn on to the children of my heart.

December is the month of the return of light in the pagan celebrations. December 21st was the shortest day and longest night and from it every day grows longer still bringing more light to our days and hearts until the Summer Solstice when the days grow shorter once again. We are all part of the circle of life and we are all one

Peace.