For a decade, I’ve come to mark time by December 23. While the calendar announces the change of season by the winter solstice two days prior, for me, December 23 will always be darker. Memories are always nearby. Their shadows return like clockwork, like uninvited guests I’ve come to expect. The air is both oppressive and fragile, pressing in and yet so thin I can barely breathe.

Very much like this day ten years ago.

Seated in a dark hospital room, my mind tried to make sense of the words “cannot sustain life” while our unborn son wiggled and squirmed inside my belly. I was twenty-seven years old, twenty-seven weeks pregnant, and completely unprepared for the news that our son wouldn’t live. Life and death warred within me, and I left that hospital room uncertain which side would win the battle, for both my son and my soul.

That is the tension that returns every year.

December 23 bears the heaviness of worst-fears-turned-realities, of pain without the certainty of what’s on the other side. Perhaps this year even more. The collective toll of 2020 has played a part, but really it’s the thought that it’s been a decade since that diagnosis, a decade of bearing grief. “Ten years,” I keep repeating. “How has it been ten years?” Ten seems like such a big number.

As I anticipated the arrival of December 23, part of me wanted to skip right over it, to get one day closer to Christmas.

But then I thought of Mary.

I imagined that young girl on the precipice of marriage, a future full of promise and expectation, whose life was also rearranged by the news of her Son. Mary held the burden of knowledge of what was to come, both the pain and the promise. And I wondered: What must it have been like to have Jesus grow within her? As she felt him move and kick, did she dream of the life he would live—or did she know his end from the beginning? As Jesus’ birth drew near, perhaps on a day very much like today, did life and death war within Mary too?

For the first time in ten years, I wondered whether the darkness I feel on December 23 is an echo of Mary’s ache in the days leading up to Jesus’ birth. Perhaps she too was weary, her brow taught with tension. While that possibility doesn’t bring back my son or diminish the grief, I find a new acceptance of what this day holds and where it can lead me. I feel a little more connected to the Christmas story.

Because perhaps the other side of pain is promise—a place where shadows bend to light and weariness welcomes the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.

The Day I Want to Pass By

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