When Holidays Haunt Us With Empty Chairs, Remember This:

“A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there …” An empty chair, an approaching holiday, tosses us into a desperate wilderness without a map. And it’s messy off the map, no matter what age — this year, particularly so.

This post is for you, the one who is holding your breath a little too tightly to your heart because this is the season when that chair becomes so much more than a chair — and you feel like you are not going to make it through. You, covering up, yet cracked wide open. I see you.

I see your bravery, navigating through the wilderness of loss. I want to remind you – to remember with you – that this wilderness is not so desperate a place when we recognize that we are the embodied sum of our experiences with love.

Hitting Pause. Nurturing Essentials.

What do you cherish? What delights you and drives you to devotion? I don’t want to know what you like. What do you cherish?

Heading into my third holiday season after Ray’s transition, I cherish that you will read on, and indulge me in savoring a sweet memory from our courtship days while you search your own heart for that which you cherish.

Honeymoon Photo Booth Fun 1975

I was working in an art studio in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan when Ray and I met. He’d returned to Detroit, after living seven years in New York City, and had been back only a few weeks when we went on our first date. The city had burned him out – he thought – but he was coming back to find me. We just didn’t know it yet.

I was 20. He was 28. He asked me to marry him, one month later. There was no doubt in my heart that YES was the only answer. Within seven weeks, we were married.

Healing Art, Mixed Media, and Paper Flowers.

I saw the vision of a woman. She coaxed me into the studio after these words popped onto the page of my journal one morning.

“He gave her paper flowers,
because he knew that she loved words.
Wax-pressed intent upon her heart,
that his voice within be heard.”

I thought this piece of art was finished when I framed and entered it in last year’s Artful Harvest show, hosted by my local art guild. Since then, she’s been hanging on a wall adjacent to my computer area. I walk by her every day.

She quietly holds space for me, like one of those tent cards that reserve your seat at a banquet table, waiting for me to venture back into the studio. Time in the studio, that once was Ray’s, comes with hurdles. It’s that grace and grief thing, creating a kind of chaos in my heart, healing through a cosmic codependency with my creative compadre, now on the other side of the veil after losing his fight with cancer. Expressing my creativity looks vastly different now as I work to heal beyond not only losing him, but also losing a breast to cancer just five months after his departure.