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You'd think the depression that comes with mourning ends with the holiday season. Sometimes, it does. Sometimes, it extends through the winter, especially when almost the very end of winter is one of those two dates that mean so much to the one in mourning, the birthday. My winter is one mourning sandwich. On one end, it's the holiday season, a time when everyone else's cheer and family gatherings remind one of who is not there and how one SHOULD be cheery. Then come the bleak days of darkness and snow, where the sun and fun stuff outside are fond memories. It's all capped off by my angel's birthday, one of the two dates that hit me like the weight of an anvil to the gut every year.
[When winter gains a menacing ally. Source]
My husband suffers from SAD, seasonal affective disorder, which means the winter stretches longer, colder, and bleaker inside than it does outside. I'm the lucky one because I don't have this. We don't talk about all of this much. I don't even think about it all the time. Most of the time, I'm okay, even during this time of year. But it's hard to watch the winter season weigh him down and make everything feel ten times harder. Then the lack of accomplishments due to depression weighs even heavier than it did before.
I never much liked the quiet days of late winter, but they're worse now that my dreams of a rainbow baby have frozen and died on the vine with 15+ miscarriages, and mourning has become a familiar weight approaching its ten-year birthday. I remind myself that all of this is further capped off with Easter, that nestled between my angel's birthday and her angelversary--the date she graduated from my arms to a higher plane--is the season of hope and the celebration that this winter of darkness and loss won't go on forever. I remind myself that "joy cometh in the morning" (Psalms 30:5) as I sit in the darkness.
It's true, but sometimes, this night of darkness and time of bleakness stretches on. I just have to hold on 'til the sunrise, or better yet, Son-rise.
