i wish
feast of increments
Christmas can be excruciating. All this talk of love and family throws heartache, loss and loneliness into relief. A woman I used to know killed herself this week, from sheer isolation it seems. In German it’s called self-murder.
It happens sometimes that the people we love are not within reach, or they have died, or we are separated by sheer human awfulness. Sometimes you just haven’t met them yet and can’t be sure they are real. This year I feel bloody lucky to be living in a brimming household, spending the holiday with people I love and where trust is rebuilding. Other times I’ve been separated from my family for geographical and also more graphic reasons and there was one Christmas I spent alone entirely, in a deep sharp almost unendurable pain. You know that special holiday feeling: that you are shut out from some cosy universal nesting time all framed in glowing windows, everyone else has a family to come home to, a loved one to choose for, trusted friends to cook for and visit and call. I wish there was a sure way of dispelling this treacherous fantasy. I wish I had a way of reaching those who suffer this season, including my former self, to ask them to hold on, to try to let the joy emerge again.
Because it will. I remember seasons in my life when I asked myself, can you die of loneliness, and heard the answer in my heart: yes – yes, you can. I’m so grateful I survived the unsurvivable times. I feel exhausted but I want to embrace life, its torment and its sweet. The perpetual leisure and the frenzy of modernity, these new tools that can take us further into life or distance us from each other. Maybe as a race we are learning in tiny, clunking, incremental steps to please stop injuring each other, to stop neglecting and ignoring, to welcome one another to the day and to embrace the golden joys of solitude. I hope we all keep on quietly learning one another’s languages. Like shade on a hot day I long for peace. In myself, and the quivering peace of many hearts. All of our hearts have struggled and been tormented. Yet here we all are. Merry Christmas to all our strange golden stained souls. And I wish for a wonderful year. A turning point. A gateway to a liveable, lovable future. A freshness that learns from old wisdoms, particularly the still-most-human communities in remnant rainforests and on deserts who have most to teach. Between the future and the past: a door.
16 comments on “feast of increments”
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Never a good time of year for people who are alone or mourning or such. I’m glad so many people recognise this and reach out to each other.
It can be brutal, can’t it. I have spent more that one Christmas entirely alone and one particular year having been dumped the day before by text message had to spend large chunks of the day lying in bed literally holding my heart through my chest because it ached so. Yes I agree… we need to let each other know we need each other.
Very timely, as this is my very first Christmas without my parents, one of whom is gone and the other is in dementia.
Oh, Hamish, I am so sorry. God, that is awfully sad. I’m sorry. X
It’s OK – I will be with friends on the day after seeing Mum at the nursing home in the morning. I won’t be alone.
Be good to your grief. It’s ok I think to have heaviness in the heart even in the midst of festivities.
I’m expressing it in various poems I’ve written over the past 18 months about it all, and that’s been of immense help.
Yes, it can be. Don’t you always feel somewhat startled by how writing about something unbearable can help bear it. It seems impossible to me, every time.
You’ll find poems such as A Reliquary for Eugarie Number, A Vigil for 2 Fathers in their 95th Year / A Vigil for One Father in his 96th Year, Home’s A Hospice and Quick Quick Slow Slow, amongst others, in the Notes section of my Profile and you are welcome to read them anytime. I’ve also arranged for some of my Dad’s poems to be published in a forthcoming anthology.
Thank you, Hamish. I have long been intrigued to read some of your work.
as an ex nurse that has done a lot of shifts in ED on xmas day and boxing day, it’s a very lonely time for a lot of people. So many attempted suicides. So much loneliness and huge expectations to give around this time of year x
I think you are right, Pippi, it’s the expectations that make it murderous. Otherwise it would just be a public holiday, shops are closed, time for a leisurely walk or nap or swim. I wonder if our cultural inadequacy in expressing any feelings but rage is a factor too, in building such pressure on the one festivity: notice how we so often need greetings cards to say “I love you” – so we rely on the stacks of presents or the harking-back-to-who-knows-what lunch.
I love this piece. I spend xmas with family and I know that I am lucky….even if relationships can be tricky at times….but loneliness and lack of community and belonging is within in so many hearts as a result of certain aspects of modernity . Even though I am loved in various parts of the world, I struggle with that feeling a lot. Yes , you can die of loneliness. Yes , we need to do more on reaching out and connecting and being kind ,But making sure that the new sense of community allows equality and freedom to be who we really are, not what a community expects of us in order to be accepted. I love your emotional fraility and bravery…..in your expression of it, you are connected and loved
It’s very gracious of you to notice and to say so. Thank you, Deb. As for dying of loneliness: I think most of us have experienced at some stage the reality that yes… you can. Aboriginal people in Australia can die because someone points the bone at them: a form of condemnation and social exclusion that feels very close to the unbearable nightliness of being on solitary evenings, when the neighbours seem just too far away. We need to be kinder to each other. I keep reminding myself that family can be built as well as blood.
I very much appreciate your pointing out the balance we need to respect between cherishing our individuality and finding the paths back to one another. To lose the gains in one would not truly win us the other. Cx
Today i sang in my community choir.
There was a song where we sang our parts and for a moment we were family.
Yes family can be built. Even sung
Thank you for sharing this, Cathoel. I was passing somewhere vaguely near your house on Christmas day and wondering if you were suffering as much as I was. It is wonderful to both see that you were not (this time), but also that you have such deep and sincere sympathy-without-pathos for those who do.
I am so angry at myself! This is not even *my* Christmas! *My* Christmas is in January and THEN I CHOOSE not to be with my family (it’s still too hard and I honor myself this year). But, of course, it matters more that this is most of my friends’ Christmas, and that they, my *chosen/logical family* have ghm…chosen, to spend it with others. Nobody broke up with me via text this week, but I almost wish they had.