When I was a student, I studied Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett. It’s a bizarre play in which there is a lot of …. waiting, oddly enough. It is all wrapped up in the meaning of life and the central characters are there, page after page, waiting for this Godot, who never arrives.
It’s one of those texts that pops up in my mind more often than I would have given it credit for back then. Waiting is something that is so prevalent in my work as a funeral celebrant. The families we, at Shoobridge Funeral Services, work with and guide through these awful times in their lives are always in a period of waiting, waiting for the funeral, waiting for grief to unravel, waiting to hit really painful milestones and birthdays and, like now, Christmas.
When we are in a good place mentally and emotionally, the season of Advent tends to be swallowed up by Christmas festivities which seem to occur earlier and earlier with each year that goes by. The singing of carols and the buying of gifts outside the Cathedral in the Christmas Market is all in full swing weeks before the Advent hymns are sung and the penitential purple robes are dusted off for this solemn season of waiting. It is as if we are all tired of waiting; and maybe the way in which the world has become so used to instant results has contributed to this.
But for those who grieve and dread the Christmas season, Advent might seem painfully long.
Last year, I found Advent almost unbearable. It was the first Christmas that I would be without my children, as they would be spending it with their father. I found the whole season tortuous as I approached the 25th with absolute dread. The waiting seemed to go on forever. I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible this season is for the bereaved.
I will finish with a poem that I wrote last Christmas, when I was missing my daughters so much. Wishing you all a peaceful Advent and Christmas, when it comes.
I miss you
Missing you makes me stop suddenly, whatever I am doing
Slicing onion on a board, sifting through apples in Tesco,
Greeting a friend as we pass outside Boots
And again that feeling rises up inside me,
Like a pulse of oncoming sadness.
Is this what grief feels like?
A heaviness like an old grey brick
She rises from my stomach and fills my chest
She is a magnet heaving herself towards another magnet
But the other magnet isn’t there,
Won’t ever be there again
She batters the walls of my body, trying to escape
In sobbing that feels out of control, deep thick loud sobs
That only missing you can produce
Going on as long as she will before she exhausts herself
Untangles herself and wanders away
Leaving me blinking in her wake.
