Christmas Stitches

I talk a lot about grief. A very smart person once told me to write the things I knew about and nothing more. I know a lot about grief. So, this column today will hereby be crowned a quilt column. I’m going to sew many thoughts together for you, bits and scraps of emotions, many of which I probably mentioned here before. Then, I’m going to apply a decorative stitch on top to hold the sentiments together. It won’t be one of the quilts you see at the State Fair each year, not a hummingbird with a first place ribbon displayed in the corner or a wedding ring pattern with an intricate border. My quilt is a crazy quilt with random shards of fabric scraped up off the floor and haphazardly and thrown together with no respect for matching colors or proper geometric shapes. After all, that’s one of the things grief does for you. The aesthetics stop mattering as much. Sometimes, for a bit, everything stops mattering as much. When you read this, Christmas will be upon us. Chairs will be empty this year. Some are due to those of us still choosing to social distance. Some are due to deaths from Covid. Some are due to other tragedies. It is a very different Christmas, as has been the entirety of 2020. Sometimes we don’t know what to say to someone in a season of grief. That’s where I become an award winning quilter. Let me stitch you out of this.

There is a misconception about the grieving process. That backward reasoning has people ascend to a stage, much like at the Olympic games, where the best griever or the wound considered most mortal, does a walk of shame to the top spot to receive the gold medal. They are flanked by the wannabes, people who are very, very sad, but didn’t lose quite as much. These participants in the grief event didn’t get a perfect 10. Admittedly, I fell into this trap for a long time. People would come to me, after the loss of my daughter, and share with me how they understood my pain because their grandfather just passed, or they lost a sister during childhood, or they had a parent who was terminally ill. I was in too much shock still to do anything but smile, nod, and cry. Later on, though, I would scream hateful things into pillows. How dare they compare that loss to my loss. The death of a child upsets the order of life, after all. I was supposed to die first, an elderly woman taken care of by her only daughter. Who would take care of me now, I wondered. Then, one day, I climbed the stairs to my gold medal throne within my castle of grief and was struck by lightning. I was wrong. It gutted me. I realized that discounting another person’s grief was tantamount to wishing they knew the extent of my agony. The only way to understand my agony would be to lose what I had lost. So, I was willing others to lose more? I was wanting people to lose children? I think I cried for a straight week. Here is my epiphany. The greatest loss you’ve ever experienced causes the greatest pain you’ve ever felt. The death of an infant or a grandparent, for the person feeling new loss, hurts EXACTLY the same as the death of my 16 year old child did to me. Wanting you to hurt more is wanting you to lose more. I want you happy, so no more of that insanity.

There is another misconception leveled by super smart people who write volumes of dissertations on grief. There are these things called stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. To read the studies and learn the therapies, it seems so simple. Why, grief must be like a quick game of Cranium! Once you’ve conquered the Data Head section, you move to the Star Performer cards, then to the Word Worm, and, once you’ve dominated Creative Cat, you win! Except, grief doesn’t work that way. It’s more like a game of Candyland. It takes you forever to get through the Peppermint Forest. By the time you get to the Gumdrop Mountains you’re crawling on your hands and knees. The Gingerbread Plum Tree pummels you until you’re bloodied and bruised, but you catch a glimpse of that Peanut Brittle House and you have hope for the first time. Then, the unthinkable happens. You draw a bad card and slide backwards down that Rainbow Trail, right down to the bowels of those dumb candy hearts. Yes, there are stages to grief. Sometimes you trip over them and run into the ground with your face. Sometimes you go through them all every hour on the hour, like a macabre Groundhog Day. Grief is a board game within a heavy fog inside of a house of mirrors. There is no up.

But, here we are, fellow Scrooges, somehow managing to fire Bob Cratchit and steal the goose from Tiny Tim. All is not lost. If you know someone floundering alone in a season of grief this year, someone who won’t get that last phone call or who can’t shake that one screen door slam that never comes, you can help. Make the phone call, even when you don’t know what to say. That’s a quilt piece. Drop off the plate of leftovers and don’t forget the cranberries, even if they say they can’t eat. That’s another quilt piece. Send the note. Sing the carol. Because, someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we’ll have to muddle through, somehow. So, have yourself a merry little Christmas, now. Thanks for helping me with my quilt. God bless us, everyone.