Finding Grey in the Rainbow

I have my own personal tradition at the beginning of each new year. It involves the simple act of completing a new family calendar. "Some deep tradition!" you say sarcastically. What started as merely a way of getting everyone's birthday and other big days on the new calendar quickly became much more. In the midst of flipping through the past year's calendar to retrieve the dates for the new year's calendar (yes, we're talking old fashioned paper here), I get to simultaneously look forward and backward. Forward to the upcoming year of celebrations and events with their spots already reserved. Backward over a year's worth of celebrations, doctor's appointments, school and kid activities.

It never ceases to amaze me as I look at the little rectangles with their color-coded scribbling, one color per family member, how very much 7 people can manage to literally squeeze into a year! I've often thought we need a larger calendar, but realize this wouldn't create more time in the year.

My tradition was bittersweet this year. I knew it would be. So rather than completing it on New Year's Day, I waited. My grandmother passed away right before Thanksgiving this year. When I came to October, her birthday month, I skipped recording her birthday on the 25th. That simple act was more difficult than I'd imagined it would be each previous year as she grew older. As she approached her 90th year, I would realize each new year's day that it very well could be the last time I recorded her birthday on the calendar. Somehow though, the official act of skipping her day...what would have been her 98th... was cause for allowing the grief to surface.

I realized as I allowed the tears to come just how much I'd been through in the last 2 months. While the colorful rectangles filled with the appointments of life don't portray the events, since mid-October we lost the little girl whom we had thought would be ours through adoption; my grandmother passed away and I had emergency surgery. There's been little time, I realized as the tears flowed, to really process everything that has happened recently. Somehow we continued to make our way through the colors on the calendar rectangles that grew ever more crowded during the holiday season.

While the new year is a time of new beginnings and resolutions, I'm finding myself looking more to the past and trying to process all that has occurred. I am struck in this processing how much easier it is to move forward; to push toward that new beginning rather than allowing myself the time needed to really reflect and feel the effects of the recent past. Yet, some part of me knows that in order to move forward healthfully, I first need to move through this grieving process.

As the calendar again begins to fill from it's plain white pages to a rainbow of appointments, activities, and celebrations, I'm trying my best to pause between the colors to find myself and allow in the grey of grief in order to move forward once again.