Ashes, Bye 2020

 It’s the New Year.

So many people taking time to reflect and talk about the blessings of this year, despite everyone acknowledging the Dumpster Fire that is 2020. 

Every time I start to maybe even possibly consider reflecting, I get this sick feeling in my stomach. Every time some one says “We know this year was hard, tell us one blessing/good thing that happened” I pause and realize:

No one wants to hear me reflect on this year. 

Truly I don’t think you want to. 

See a year ago I was at Chuckie Cheese with my kids while my mom was at the hospital with my Dad. While sitting there eating my cardboard pizza and listening to my kids play, I got the text that Daddy had Stage Four Brain Cancer. 

And it all just kind of went up in flames from there. 

Honestly, call me callous, but I didn’t care about the Pandemic and the virus and the Quarantine. I didn’t care about Ellie having to quit her first year of school or Dean leaving his preschool. I didn’t care that I had to wear a mask, we’d already been wearing them. I sent Ellie away when she had the flu. The virus was just another thing and I just didn’t have the space or the energy to care. 

I still don’t. 

When I think about this year I think about making food for my Dad. Planning dinners and breakfasts and lunches and reminding him to take smaller bites. I think about the way he snapped at me, the kids, and my mom. The way the cancer in his brain spread and changed his personality. 

I’m not ready, yet, to count the blessings. I know they’re there. I know we were blessed. I know we have so many who love us. I know so many loved and respected my Dad. I know everyone hurt watching him die. 

But I had a front row seat. As did all of my family. 

And all I see right now when I reflect on this year is the hurt and the pain and I just feel...angry. 

My soul is still sharp and ragged. The corners of those pieces tear holes into others. My inner monologue wants to tell people “Shut it. It wasn’t so bad. Knock it off. If I can watch someone die slowly I think you can handle wearing a stupid mask.” 

Grief has been all consuming. I can’t see past it to the blessings. 

This begs the question: why do I feel the need to soften the edges of my grief to accommodate the world?  

Actually, why does it feel like there is some unspoken rule that we have to see the bright side? 

I don’t see the good is my Dads dying and his death. I don’t see the good in the way he suffered. 

And right now, I don’t have to. I don’t have to focus on the blessings, I don’t have to see the good. 

I am allowed to hurt. 

I. Am. Allowed. To. Hurt. 

So I brought in the New Year in a quiet house, snuggled up next to my husband. Glad to see the end of 2020, refusing to count my blessings and sitting in the ashes for a moment. Because it feels like my life has gone up in flames...and all I am left with are cool ashes, that is where I am  the ashes  

Maybe tomorrow I will be able to count my blessings. Maybe it will take a week, a month, another four years before I can admit to the Good that was in 2020. 

But not yet. 

After all, while Jesus was dying a painful death on the cross, I don’t think anyone would have asked him to see the blessing. Didn’t He ask His Father why He had been forsaken? 

Jesus was allowed His pain. 

Just as I am allowed mine.