(Content warning: death, grief)
One of my favorite quotes I’ve heard Reverend Carl give is from educator and activist Parker Palmer: “There are two ways for the heart to break: apart into many shards like a fragment grenade, or open into greater capacity so we can hold life’s inevitable tensions creatively, not destructively.”
My father, John Grastorf, was a member of this congregation. Some of you may remember him from the coffee houses here. He was a wonderful musician, a crazy old hippie in the very best sense of the term, a practicing Pagan, and as kind a person as you could ever imagine. He was a wonderful dad. I think one of the greatest strengths I have is that I never wondered whether I was loved. My dad loved my sister and I with the fire of a thousand suns, and we knew it. He was an extraordinary person.
Four years ago this morning at about 2 AM, he died. He was one of the million-plus deaths from the worst days of the covid epidemic. My grief for the loss of him is bottomless and springs from more than one deep well of pain. You see, although in Unitarian Universalist spaces I am a lay minister, in Pagan spaces I am full time clergy. I was ordained more than twenty years ago now and have been in service ever since. This means I’ve spent a lot of time taking the last walk with people to the door of the Ancestors. I’ve held the hands of the dying and the grieving and sung our songs, said our prayers, placed blessings, and held vigil.
The secondary wound I carry from the grief of my father’s death is that I was not able to offer that to him. I watched him through a glass window as he faded away. I stood outside in the cold talking to him on a phone. I couldn’t hold his hands or put another blanket on him. I couldn’t sing softly to him or sneak him contraband. It was too dangerous then. The vaccines had not yet arrived and most of us were still sheltering in place. Speaking on a phone while looking at each other through a double paned window at his nursing home was the best we could do.
When the nurses knew he was not going to make it through the night they finally let me in. They put me into a full plague moon suit. Two layers of gloves, a complete jumpsuit, two masks and a face shield. The last time I held his hands I couldn’t feel his skin, and he couldn’t see my face. For someone who has spent so much time in death spaces, the wound of not being able to accompany my own father to his death is an additional grief that may never really heal.
December had been hard before he passed. Many of you also remember Katherine Savery Gray, who was a member of this congregation. She had an incredible voice. Along with singing in the choir here, Kat was a member of my band, Kindred Crow. Like many bands, Kindred Crow spends a lot of time together and as a musical group we are very strongly bonded. The relationship between band members is such that we are more likely to refer to each other as siblings than friends.
Kat died from glioblastoma brain cancer on December 7th, 2018. I am heavily tattooed and one of the tattoos on my body was inked using some of her ashes. I carry her with me always.
When I’m looking at the yearly calendar, December seems like a dark hallway. Something I just have to get through in order to make it to the other side. This parade of painful anniversaries bookends the month, beginning and ending on grief. And for years, I aspired to be broken open to in order to hold even more love, but the truth is that I was more shattered into fragments than anything else. I had lost all of my love for the season that in my own faith path of Heathenry is our most sacred time of year.
I’m a writer, particularly about the journey of spirit from a Pagan perspective. And one of the funny things that happens when your job is to think deeply and then turn those ruminations into words is that you can get really sick of your own thoughts.
I realized I was stuck. Stuck in my own pain, in my own internal cycle of overthinking and navel-gazing and continuing to probe and interrogate my grief. So many people carry grief through this month. Whether they lost their loved ones in December or not, the winter holidays and the way they bring us all together highlights the spaces that aren’t filled. The people who aren’t with us at the table. The voices missing from the conversations. To the Pagan way of thinking, this dark time of year is both the time of the underworld and the time of the sun’s return. This has always been a season of grief.
I needed to find a way to hold both truths: that this sacred season is one of both grief and joy. Loss and celebration. Darkness and light.
So I made a plan and began to change my approach to the winter holidays.
I can only ever speak from my own experience. I’m going to tell you what worked, and what is working, for me in terms of finding joy amidst the grief. It’s okay if none of this works for you, or if only one of my ideas fits your life. We all grieve in our own way. We all experience joy in our own way.
The first thing I did was change the way the holidays looked. I think one of the ways we can get stuck is in our stuff. Most of us have specific bins or boxes of holiday decorations. Some of them may include ancestral items – things that have been passed down to us.
I’m here to tell you that if you leave the set of decorations you’ve always used in a box for a year in order to try something different, you will not get struck with a lightning bolt from the sky. We really can change the way the holidays look in our homes.
My very first Christmas away from home, I was in the Marine Corps and stationed in Okinawa, Japan. My mother gathered together a beautiful set of silver ornaments and shipped them to me so I could have a Yule tree. In the decades that followed, I expanded that set. So, for around 20 years, my Yuletide was silver, purple, and black. What can I say? I’m goth. I even had a black Yule tree for a while just to really commit to the aesthetic.
I still love that set of ornaments and decorations. I haven’t thrown them away. But the thing with a set of objects is that they get associated with different things through the years. That beautiful collection of holiday decorations saw the hardest Decembers with me.
I was thinking deeply about Yuletide and its symbolism and decided to aim for something totally different and more rooted in the season: sunlight. I asked my friends and wider community for some help. I requested that if they were going through their holiday ornaments and had some gold or sun-themed ones they weren’t going to use, to send them my way. I began keeping an eye out for inexpensive solar or golden ornaments at places like Goodwill. And as surely as the sun rises, my home began to fill with sun-colored decorations.
We are such sensory beings. Whether we realize it or not, we respond to colors, shapes, symbols, and light in deep and profound ways. Filling my home with not only a different set of symbols and colors, but ones more oriented toward the deepest layers of the winter holidays was a powerful change. The warm colors inspired greater warmth of spirit.
The other thing I did was take more ownership of and responsibility for my grief. I am one of the many people you know who lives with mental illness. I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder that I both take medication for and manage with various lifestyle factors. It is largely in a manageable place at this point because of those practices.
I realized I needed to take a similar approach to my grief. I think I had assumed that it was going to somehow get better with time. What I know right now is that although my grief has changed over time, “better” isn’t exactly the word I would use to describe it. It’s still there. There’s more space around my grief, but it remains all too easy to nudge that bottomless well and cause it to spill over.
So, I became rigorous in the management of my mental health in December.
I am not late for, nor do I miss, any doses of the various meds and supplements I am on that keep me healthy. Most of the year I can be a little lackadaisical with this and it’s fine. The occasional miss or taking meds outside my timing window doesn’t have any noticeable impacts. But December? In December I set timers and calendar reminders and am far more likely to have a pill container in my purse with backup meds just in case.
Likewise, I avoid depressants. I’m a meadmaker and take great pride in my home brewed honey wine, but I don’t drink it this month. I’ve noticed that I just don’t have enough margin to add a depressant like alcohol and not experience some mental health consequences the next day. Although holiday-themed cocktails are often lovely, they are not a part of my winter celebrations. Adding a depressant is just too much right now.
Part of taking responsibility for my grief in December also meant better calendar management. For me, days heavy with grief are exhausting. My focus is shot and I don’t have the energy for a regular workload. So, I do less. When I plan my December calendar, I block off most weekends and a lot of weeknights with an all-caps calendar reservation that says “NOTHING.” If that day arrives and I’m okay, then great – I can do something then. But I’ve learned not to schedule myself the way I normally do. I just need more recovery and rest time than usual, so now I make sure I plan for it.
I get as much sunlight as possible. My beloved spouse and I own a home that was in pretty rough shape when we bought it. It’s our forever-project and we really love it. One of the many things we’ve done over the past few years was turn a screened-in porch into a sunroom with a wood stove. One full wall of the porch is now windows and they receive abundant morning to early afternoon sunlight. On sunny days, I carry my laptop down to the porch, light the woodstove, and work in the sunlight. Likewise, I try to get outside while the sun is up. That’s tricky during winter when you work full time, but I do it as often as I can.
I include one activity on my December calendar that is wholly unrelated to the holidays but that I will love. Last year, there was an exhibit of props and muppets from Jim Henson’s career on display in Baltimore. For months afterwards, I joked that the title of my autobiography was going to be “Crying at the Dark Crystal Exhibit: The Irene Glasse Story.” It was wonderful. It was exactly what I needed. It was something beautiful and meaningful that had nothing to do with Yuletide.
This year, I went to Garden Lights at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. It’s a light display in a botanical garden, but it is not holiday themed. It was absolutely beautiful. Seeing the trees and gardens there illuminated in pinks, purples, and blues was extraordinary.
These moments of added beauty soften the sharp edges of the season. They’re an immersion into who I am and what I love as separate from this very challenging time of year.
The last technique I bring to the table is one you’ve heard Reverend Carl talk about: savoring. When I notice that I’m in a moment of joy or beauty or connection, I pause and try to become as present to that moment as possible. I direct my attention to that which is good and healing. I hold onto it a little longer than usual.
These changes I’ve made didn’t make the grief go away. I still have bad days. But as we know with grief, the real healing path is in how we learn to live with it. How we learn that joy and beauty can coexist with pain. For me, finding ways to hold my grief while creating new opportunities for joys both small and large has been the thing that works the most.
If you take nothing else from my words today, I hope it is this: it is possible to change the winter holidays. There are so many ways to be connected to the season of the winter solstice. You can transform this time of darkness and light into a shape that serves you. You can find new ways to experience beauty, new techniques for helping your mindset, new traditions that ground you in your own values and preferences.
A new solar year is here once more. Perhaps the sunlight to step into now is that of a fresh beginning. A breaking-open in order to hold even more.
This sermon was offered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick on Sunday, December 29th, 2024.
If you enjoy my blogs, sermons, and articles, please consider supporting me through Patreon. Patreon is what enables me to invest time in writing, teaching and exploring the wide world of spirit. Through small monthly donations from supporters, I am able to make ends meet and devote time to this Work that would otherwise be spent at a mundane form of income generation. Here’s the link: https://www.patreon.com/glassewitchcottage
