This Christmas season I cried more than I have since the first days after my wife’s passing, yet this time it felt good. It felt cleansing. That’s because I had someone to cry with me, someone who also knew the pain of losing a life partner and suffering that loneliness unique to widowhood.
We widowed folk talk about “moving on” or “turning the page” or “opening a new chapter,” but that transition eludes us. We keep clinging to the remnants of the only life we knew, as though from the fragments we could put it back together. We know we can’t, and that’s what puts the “loneliness” in being alone. That aching for what we have lost builds like a pressure cooker. It must somehow be released if we are ever to move on to a new chapter of our lives.
There is a song by Larry Gatlin in which he sings, “I just can’t cry anymore.” I thought I had reached that point over a year ago, but I found I had not. Catharsis has been defined as a process of releasing repressed emotions. I found that all the sobs and tears I had shed alone had not given that release. And even those moments when I let myself shed tears with my children and grandchildren, I was aware of some reserve. I felt restrained from fully letting go and letting them into my pain and sorrow.
This Christmas, seated near a woman who had traveled over 8,000 miles to be with me at this emotional time, the floodgate broke. Waves of emotion, sobs and tears, flowed shamelessly, and she cried with me. We both knew that the pain of loss had to be cleansed fully so that happy memories could follow us into our new chapter.
The thing about catharsis is that it is not something you can manufacture, plan or schedule, yet it must happen if we are to go on. And for the Christian, going on is not something optional. God left us here, so He has a purpose for us. That purpose is becoming ever clearer for me as the floods of emotion begin to settle.
