Silent Night and an Empty Chair

You look around the room, who is missing? The table is set, the holiday meal is being served. Who is missing at your table? You look and see a chair, one that was used in the past, empty of the loved one you miss, and a cold plate. The table and the people there offer a circle of solitude, and yet, the ache from the absent person is filling your stomach faster than the Christmas meal. 

It is grief. The heart feels lost, the spleen broken, and the temples feel full with pressure. The pressure may give you a slight headache or lightheadedness. Grief exhausts me, maybe you too. Do you feel their absence? Do you hear their silence screaming at you? 

There is always the sunlight rising in the distance, peaking through the window blinds, telling you another day has either come or ended. If it is a new day, it wants to be greeted. If it’s the sunset, it wants you to bid it farewell and offer it a slight bow of your head and whisper, “Until tomorrow, dear friend.” It’s your attempt at showing gratitude for the life you are still given. Perhaps, it is even an attempt to show gratitude to the empty plate that sits next to you, offering you peace that you once knew them and had the pleasure of their presence, even if it was just for a moment in time. 

What should one seek this holiday season, going into another new year without the one you lost? As we know, grief is perpetual. It does not end but continues to extend, drifting in and out of our lives like the wind. It comes in cool and stabs at the skin or is warm with a glorious memory that brings both a smile and tears of joy. It comes heavy or light, and like the wind, grief can feel as if it is moving the earth, changing directions, and bringing either a calm light or a gray storm. So, what to seek in this changing year? Is it a mother’s hug you can no longer have? Is it a sister’s laughter? A father’s long stare, or a friend's smile that you remember well but he ran out of smiles and decided life was no longer worth living? Perhaps, it is a child’s love that you miss most? 

We sometimes suffer from happiness. There’s a level of guilt smiling when we have experienced so much loss. We suffer from happiness because life shows us we cannot attain it without pain. Happiness doesn't stay, and neither does contentment. As Thay states, we must learn to suffer well in order to be mindful of the joy we have. So we look again around the table, the Christmas tree, and the empty chair, and we realize that we once had someone special there, but when we pause in their memory and take a reflective moment, we see other faces that are still with us and smile. We are grateful for their love and more importantly, grateful that we are truly present with them to offer our love. The night leaves us but the memory does not. 

I do know that when we experience loss and the pain of grief, that we must return to life. I have done so a thousand times. I have been through twenty-thousand silent nights. 

It seems like society rushes grief, as if the emotions you are displaying is out of vanity or attention. Many will expect you to move on from your pain. Others will move on from you, or ignore your loss all together. I often wonder why people are so uncomfortable to be around someone in pain, especially pain from loss? My mother used to say that people seemed uncomfortable around her because of her cancer. I have found people’s lack of comfort around grief is similar to the discomfort they feel around depression. We must all be fools in denial to think that we will always be around people that are healthy, mentally or physically. To evade this would be to evade the realities of life. I say, lean into people who are struggling. In fact, grasp onto them with all your might because they need your strength. 

With this, there is danger in letting grief consume you to the point where you forgot to live the life that you have been offered. I know for me, as difficult as it is to lose the people I love, it would be a tragedy to not have a lust for life and to live it as I have set out to do. My way of living is to have experiences, great and small, along with a heaping of good conversations. I have been accused of having the gift of gab. I want you to know, if I take the time to stop and converse with you, it is genuine and I care. Your words are a gift to me, and I hope mine are to you. I want to live my life mindfully and love with meaning. That seems enough.

I think about my mother daily and miss her as I would if the sun stayed in darkness. Some days, grieving her lays heavy on my chest, as if something is wrong with me and I have to force myself to take a full breath. However, I know my mom would not want me to be paralyzed by grief. She would want her youngest to travel, write more books, laugh, love, and find joy in my life. She would want me to continue teaching from my experiences in order to help others. She often told me this in her last months. I owe her that for the life she gave me. 

Oftentimes, our relationship with death, like with life, is the way we approach it. I choose to approach both life and death with a great deal of curiosity. When death comes, I believe it will be a wonderful departure, where I will see those I have lost and be able to run the woods with my dogs, hear my sister’s laughter, and hug my mother. By then, there will be more people to see and to say hello to their souls as they greet me with a smile. 

One of my curiosities with death is to think about those who are here with me, in this present moment. They, like me, are dying a little daily. We all are as death is a part of life. A part that most do not like to think about. I think about what life would be like without the people who are still alive and taking the time to spend with me? This is not dwelling in a dark, negative space. For me, it makes me appreciate the life and time that I have with them. It makes me realize how important they are to me and not to take their existence for granted. To think about their death, or my own, brings me into the moment that I share with them. I am thankful, no matter how much time I spent with them, that they were a part of my story. I believe that is what we all do for one another, become a part of each other’s story. That part could be a word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, or the entire novel. All of the encounters I have had in my life have left characters that were an integral piece of my personal story. They all shaped me in some way and led me to the plot and theme of my life and hopefully a wonderful ending. 

The new year is upon us. Many of us grieve. Many of us fear the future and what it holds. Some of us find darkness in our past. Some dwell on their mistakes and sins, finding shame in their actions. More recently, we have seen the worst and best of us use the son of God to promote their own agendas. We all have seen cruelty unfold before us. However, we have also seen love. We have seen joy and companionship, and those with a great deal of empathy and compassion strive to lift their fellow humans. We would be naïve to believe that our lives will be full of joy and no suffering, just as we would be naïve to believe that our world would be full of good, moral people, without having tyrants. What does this have to do with grief, an empty chair, or a silent night? Suffering adds to suffering. You must learn how to deal with it in all forms in order to understand it as a whole. You must take the time to sit close to your suffering, no matter its form, and understand it. One cannot walk away from it or deny it or it will become stealthy and attack you when you are not prepared. 

Sit now with the empty chair and in the silence of the night, and remember those you lost, and reflect on who you want to become. For me, I know the people that have left before me would want me to grow into the man I strive to become. I am not without flaws and will stumble from time to time and I will have to pull several thorns from my heel, but to even get the chance to live this life and extend my journey is a gift. It is a gift that the dead have given us, to continue on without them, not without pain, but with understanding. Peace to you in the silence of the night and the new year that I hope greets you well.