Forever Twelfth Night

January and February is a time when when many feel low.

The holiday decorations are all stripped away. The once decked halls so full of twinkling, seasonal scents, joyous music and abundance are now austere, indicating that the season of good will has passed and taken with it all that evokes hope, warmth, love, togetherness and the joy of holiday, now a season past.

All the lights that myriad festivals both religious and secular, ancient and new, bring into our dark Decembers, are snuffed.

Much of my family live in the frozen north of Scandinavia, where the darkness rules the winter and yet under threat of superstition there will be no seasonal decor or symbolic candles past twelfth night. And so, as those lights are dampened, so is their spirit as they long for spring.
I live in California, where the sun always shines and yet the stripping of the holiday lights still casts a gloom.

Light, the universal symbol of hope, new beginnings, warmth and refuge, the beacon of sanctuary, the guide to home, to safety for those on treacherous seas both literal and metaphoric, has been brought into our towns, our schools, our homes for all that it invokes throughout the past holiday weeks and now, all at once…is now removed and in the contrast of it’s absence, heightens the remaining darkness.

Many will shop, exercise, diet, divorce or renovate their way through the emotional inertia brought on by that darkness with tradition and commerce shooing them towards the promise of the new….a new year, a new body, a new you, a new look, a new life.

I will not.
I am a grieving Mother.
Every day is January.
I always feel the change of a brighter season past.
Every day, I feel the bleakness in contrast to what went before.
Every day, I feel the absence of the twinkling lights, the music and the joy of what it was to be in my child’s presence, to hear his voice, his laughter, drink in his personal scent unmistakable in adulthood and just as I first sensed it upon his birth.
It’s always January for me in a way that a new body, new look or a new life can never soothe.

My life in grief did, however, deliver a new me, and with that .. a gift, a new way to remember.
My memories of my lost child are both that of recall and projection.
Both real from the past and imagined in the here and now.
A constant dialogue alternating twixt what he did say or do, in life, and what he would say or do, if he were here now.
I remember him dancing with me then, whilst I imagine him dancing with me now, building the image of now from my memories of then, in a blend of wishful thinking and sensory recall to create another new memory in his glaring bodily absence.
It brings me the light and the joy of what I had, and the darkness and pain of what I have lost, in equal measure and it’s a poor substitute for the laser show of Luke’s presence, but still, there is light in the memory, which I treasure, nurture and guard fiercely. No seasonal change or superstition can snuff that, because it is within me.
This gift from the curse of child loss is what powers me through my own private ritual of bringing light into my constant darkness, my absence of what went before, my eternal January.

And I suspect that it is infectious.
The thought of gathering with fellow grievers to share experiences of agonizing untimely loss, as we do, may seem dismal and dark to many, but I always marvel…
as we share our memories, our stories, our pain and our joy, with our fellow grievers, how our smiles and tears spread throughout the room, as the memories of those lost fill our hearts, like the passing of a torch of light.. and with it, the offering of comfort, warmth, togetherness and sanctuary, bringing light into our collective darkness.