Super Power

Is it a superpower, the ability to be surrounded with love and good things and still feel an underlying ... sadness, or melancholy?

It's neither a happy Christmas nor a blue one, but both at once.

I saw that a dead friend's just-bereaved husband was signed on to another web utility this evening. Were the feelings of worry and regret that it's his first Christmas without his partner really about him, a man I've only met once? Or am I just casting about for something to justify or make sense of a sense of loss or bereavement that was already there, that I brought in with me? And was that sense of loss about my friend? Or something else entirely?

People have been dying for millions of years. I've lost loved ones before. And yet this year it's as if I *just* woke up to mortality. And it has colored this whole season. Even the joys are in relief against it.

I think some good comes of this. I suspect I will take this and allow it to sharpen my sense of what's good in the world and how precious it is.

Right now, however, I'm all too conscious of how precious things feel that way partly because there is a deep, bad emptiness yawning under us.

I don't know whether I'm foolish for thinking about this so much, or whether I should be thinking and feeling about it even harder.

So this is Christmas.