We recently started our holiday puzzle. I’m not sure whether my accompanying emotions suggested I was triggered or grateful. It was nearly a year ago that I obsessively put a puzzle together in that very spot after hearing our primary care doctor first utter the word “cancer”. We sat in silence, trying to pull the pieces together while we waited to hear if his blood work demanded that we urgently head to the ER. If I could just focus on the next piece, breathing deep, eyes shifting between box cover and table, then I could give myself something to do besides spin and break. Anything asking for more of myself would have been too much. Now, the puzzle is of Star Wars rather than the explorer scene I selected last year. As we sit, Isaac and I quietly reminisce about the appointments in-between the piecing last year. I remember these days as the worst of my life. Part of me wants to never do a puzzle again. Sitting in that same spot again, something guttural in me wants to burst. I’m just below the surface. But once again I breathe, sorting pieces, saying that cancer isn’t going to take this from us. Even this feels like another battle won.
I have been texting with two different friends today, each about their respective cancer diagnoses. I got a text from another friend whose parents have covid, dancing around the question of going to the hospital. Nothing about this year is normal. This is not the year to feel guilty about our tainted gratitude. Many of us are breathing through the pain, just getting through the next day, questioning if what was once joyful will ever feel normal again. We find ourselves waiting for our own glimmer of hope. We wait in anticipation, in this broken world, for a sign that we will be okay.
Especially now, we long to know that the broken things will be made whole again. But I’m starting to think that the lesson of this season isn’t about avoiding everything painful and broken, but walking with both gratitude and grief hand in hand. Knowing God turns everything upside down. When I ache in grief, I am somehow that much more grateful for who he is. In the moments where I have felt most broken, most desperate, he sees. He knows. He cares. He’s never given me cliches to stuff my grief, make it less intrusive. He makes room for it, welcoming it into the weaving of my story of need and hope. The thread makes it beautiful as it shapes who I am and who I am becoming. The lie of comfort as the goal becomes less and less appealing, I’m learning that pain means I’m beautifully human.
My deepest breaking began during advent, with the pairing of a world breaking down with the hope that this isn’t all there is. In my darkest days, I longed for eternity, for a new heaven and new earth where sickness and sadness and cancer and racism and division were all untrue. We still live in that tension, of a babe already born, died, and risen - and a world not yet made new. This is our glimmer of hope; we will not be left in our pain forever.
