Well, it’s Christmas Day, 2024, more than a year after Emily has left the earth, yet as I sit by my living room fireplace, with our humble tree lit up, adorned with ornaments from our collective past, gifts of pottery and glass and wool strewn around me from our gift opening of last night, and my robe and Lazy-boy making me cozier yet, I feel that girl: my Emily. She’s here. Hi Emily. I love you. That’s what I say every day when I wake up. It’s one of my first thoughts and always my first greeting. It’s not, Oh, you’re gone: it’s, Hey there, kiddo.

Thank the gods (as Charlotte says) for this massive grace: for the grace that I believe with all my heart that I can still commune with my beloved, that I can and do choose to make Em an active part of my life every day.

I’ve added one more S to my list of S’s that I talk through with her each day, those being:

Serenity

Serendipity

Signs

Safety

My new S is Security: security that we will be alright; security that I can move forward in my personal, work, spiritual, and emotional life and know that much joy is here and to come; security that I can live long and make a difference to those in my circle and beyond, and security that I can afford to do so without sacrificing sanity, without worrying, without working incessantly from a misplaced sense that what I have is not or will not be enough.

I have begun substitute teaching, mostly secondary, and I love it. I lost nestling in with individual students, checking in on them, having real conversations about their real lives: their cars, their boyfriends/girlfriends, their trips to Mt. Washington to go skiing, their after-school jobs, their fraught friendships. One of my gifts is establishing a rapport with people and that’s the magic I bring to this subbing gig. I’m not trying to control kids and force them to get their work done – I cajole a bit with Starbursts and gentle redirection, but mostly I just make things peaceful and safe. I try to make sure that our 70 minute bubble will not be full of senseless noise and time wasted, but that they will have a bit of a refuge, and perhaps learn a bit about how Macbeth was a “pussy” (as aptly stated by a student) and whose story is relevant in today’s world too, or how writing a really powerful sentence can take your own breath away with its relevance and beauty. 

I love the energy of being with students again: I’ve missed it so much. I often come home and Don will be cooking dinner, the house will be warm, the rain will be coming down sideways, and I’ll be able to slip into a hot bath before dinner, I’ll tell him about my day and he’ll feel jealous because he, too, wants to be back with students (which will come when work visas and trans-country teacher qualifications are sorted). I’ll listen to Don talk to me about art or music or listen to him playing the guitar. When Charlotte is home, as she is now for two whole glorious weeks, a whole new magic enters: her joi de vivre, her gentle kindness and constant checking in: Are you okay, mama? when I so much as say ouch, which I do a lot because I am always bumping into things, or starting a new spasm in my body from some ill-advised over-exertion. She and Don will jam on guitars together; he is teaching her to drive stick shift, which I happily absent myself from, having been party to one short drive up the road that left me feeling like a jar of pickles rolling on the floor. Charlotte cleans up after every dinner, and we sit around the dining room table with a candle burning for our Emily, and some chocolate or oranges to finish off our meals. Yesterday we made snicker doodles. Always there is laughter with Charlotte, even when there are also tears. She is such a great comfort in our collective storm: a storm that has eased into a gentle one, that no longer tears down our fences and the branches of our strong, mighty trees. “When you look at a tree in a storm, you see that the top of the tree is very unstable and vulnerable. The wind can break the smaller branches at any time. But when you look down to the trunk of the tree, you have a different impression. You see that the tree is very solid and still, and you know that it will be able to withstand the storm.” (Thich Nhat Hanh) Indeed, this is true. This storm will not take us down.

A barred owl, or perhaps two, have taken up residence in some of our trees out back. Even though Don snores on occasion, I no longer want to put in my earplugs because the whoos of the owls give me such quiet joy. The ocean is almost always stormy now in this Vancouver Island winter, and that, too, gives me ease rather than turmoil. Standing on the shore, even in pelting rain, I can feel Emily into my bones. Never one to hug easily, but always happy to receive my touch in the form of massage, I can now feel her gentle massage, comforting her mama, apologizing for the pain she has caused, and also assuring that her presence in the infinite cosmos is, oh, so much better for her. And that she is still here in the wind and the rain and the ocean and the birds. 

So, on this Christmas morning, I wish for peace on earth, peace in the hearts of all, peace to those who are grieving and peace to those who worry and wonder what will come next. May you rest, may you be comforted, may you feel (if not empirically know) that life goes beyond what we can experience with our five senses, and that it wanders into the ephemeral. The stars can remind us of that. Look upward. Rest and release.