Grief, gratitude and green.
By: Dillan Digiovanni
Tags: Christmas, Solitude, Gratitude, Grief, Holidays

First I said 2015. Then I stopped and counted again.

“2013. I’ve been alone on Christmas since 2013.”

That’s a lot of holidays to spend in solitude. So many mornings to wake up with nothing under a tree, or even having a tree for that matter, for you from someone else. No one moonlighting as Santa Claus to leave presents marked with your name on a little paper tag.

If you have had this experience, you might be able to relate.

If you’ve never experienced this, you might be able to just imagine.

Each year, like this one, I wrote about what I experienced to help other people and maybe it helped me feel better, too.

After I had one or two or five under my belt, the rest started to get easier. Never easy. Maybe with each year, it got better. Or maybe it didn’t but maybe I just got better at planning out a meal for myself and planning to take a walk in the city or the woods (I always did, wherever I lived at the time) and consciously preparing myself mentally and emotionally for that moment in the morning where my eyes opened and I realized it was another Christmas morning alone.

And then again throughout the day, as the moods passed through me.

Each year, sitting in my own company and practicing such deep self-compassion, I got better at being present with reality and my suffering seemed to subside.

This year, many people will be experiencing that moment I just mentioned for so many reasons. Maybe because of a breakup. Maybe because of COVID. Maybe a recent unrelated death in the family. Maybe continual estrangement.

Maybe mere personal choice.

And maybe this might help, because it helped me think it and then write it, like my worst moments of loneliness really meant something. They meant I was forming a long-overdue relationship to gratitude — something I hadn’t felt deeply enough to make a real difference in my life up to that point. I took far too much for granted. And I don’t think we learn any kind of lessons in life until something hurts enough to make us catch our breath, and as we steady ourselves on the nearest solid thing, it’s then that we feel the shift. The thing that clicks into place where we know we’re transformed, no longer the person we were “before”.

This year has been a horrible year so many people. And it’s been interesting that for me, it was the best of my life. For many reasons. I’m not sure why that happened but I don’t question it too much. I feel like I paid my dues, and then some. I have struggled and suffered and worked my way through some intense spiritual growth for many years, so I felt it was right on time for my breakthrough to the other side.

And that’s where I am. Only here isn’t unicorns and rainbows. It’s very wonderful. And, it’s pretty difficult. And the person I call partner now feels the same. We’ve been through a lot in our short lives on this planet, but enough to feel simpatico about the struggle to balance grief and gratitude.

We’re practicing making space for both on a daily basis so our gratitude is bigger than our grief. On good days, we pull it off. On other days, she takes baths and I go for walks in the woods. Sometimes we do that together — the walks, that is. Our bathtub fits one. And that’s how grief goes, we’re finding out.

Sometimes we feel it alone, sometimes we share it. Gratitude goes the same way.

There’s no script to follow. No timeline we’re tending to. No rush. No pressure. No posturing to pretend otherwise. Shit, I haven’t written in months and hardly even post to social media anymore…but wanted to today because it felt poignant given the gravity of this day.

She and I walked in the woods yesterday morning and both realized, when I asked, “what was your worst Christmas?”

I shared mine. It was 2017.

She shared hers. And she shared the difficult and painful details that she had told me about before, as I had told her of mine…but for some reason, we had never stopped to do the math.

She paused. “It was 2017, actually,” and she smiled.

“We’re star-crossed,” I said. Our deepest grief led to our great gratitude right now.

Gratitude for how strong we were.

Gratitude for how brave we’ve been.

Gratitude for how hard we worked.

Gratitude for how long we spent being alone, and liking it, and then LOVING it, before finding each other. It allows us the breathing room we need to be alone, together. The very ability to do that, after a few real misfires in previous relationships on both our parts, gives us so much joy to practice.

I’m settling in to how it feels when there’s room for both grief and gratitude. The room we make. The room we take. One begets the other if you’re present enough to bear witness to the pain that brings about the profound pleasure on the other end.

Is it particularly brave to do this? Or is it just part of being an adult? That’s what we think. We know it’s a process and one we’re both participating in imperfectly.

Being patient is part of that imperfect process. It’s about patience and breathing and being sad and being again happy…if only for a moment before the sad creeps in again. It’s about remembering being alone and awkward as a guest at someone’s house and craving the moment when we could be alone again. And being both glad that it’s over for us both, in this moment of nowness, and being gravely sad about how horrible it felt to be so alone, to feel like another soul would never know our heartache.

This year, 2020, was when this changed for us. And our hearts beat fast to keep up as they expand in proportion to this joy that neither of us has ever felt. Joy that feels foreign. Joy that feels very hard to embrace. Joy that feels scary to trust.

And Joy that also feels…so very right and very good.

If we had never known how it felt to be alone, so alone, we would never cherish how it feels for that loneliness to be over.

Like the green grass we now see that the snow covered just last week, all this impermanence is the perfect teacher.