december 21

a holding of both ending and beginning

This Sunday marks the anniversary of two deaths that have shaped my life in ways I’m still discovering. My best friend and my dad both died on December 21st—different years, same date. The winter solstice. The longest, darkest day of the year.

The calendar offers no mercy for this particular coincidence, but perhaps there’s an odd kind of poetry in it too. The day when light is most scarce, when darkness reaches its fullest extent before slowly, imperceptibly beginning to turn back toward brightness. A hinge point. A holding of both ending and beginning.

People sometimes ask if it makes it harder, having both losses anchored to the same day. I’ve stopped trying to answer that question. Grief doesn’t work in comparatives. It’s not harder or easier. It’s just what it is—a day when memory thickens, when the world feels both more fragile and more precious.

There’s something about doubled grief that defies explanation. It’s not that the losses add together mathematically. They layer. They echo. They create a kind of harmony I never wanted to know—two different stories of love and loss humming beneath the surface of an ordinary December day.

On December 21st, I hold space for two entirely different relationships, two entirely different people who shaped me, two entirely different ways of missing someone. My best friend’s particular laugh. My dad’s specific way of being present. The losses don’t blur together, but they do something else—they witness each other.

I have been tempted to resent the calendar for this. It feels cruel, like the universe is playing a cosmic joke at my expense. But a year into this now, I’m learning something unexpected: there’s an odd kind of mercy in having a known date.

I’m not ambushed. I see December 21st coming from weeks away. I can prepare—or at least, I can acknowledge that preparation isn’t really possible and make peace with that. I can clear space. I can let people know I might be quieter than usual. I can stop pretending I’m fine before I even start.

The grief arrives on schedule, but so does something else—permission. Permission to remember without apology. Permission to cry if I need to. Permission to light candles, to tell stories, to sit with what feels impossible to sit with.

And here’s what I’m learning about carrying multiple griefs: they don’t cancel each other out, but they do speak to each other. The way I learned to grieve my friend taught me things about how to grieve my dad. The way my dad’s death cracked me open made space for a deeper kind of friendship than I’d known before. Loss begets loss, yes—but somehow, paradoxically, love begets love too.

I’m different because of both of them. I pastor differently. I write differently. I hold pain differently—both my own and others’. I’ve learned that you can carry grief and joy in the same breath, that you can laugh at the absurdity of the calendar while also weeping at its precision.

If you’re reading this and you also have a day that holds more than one loss, I see you. If your grief is compounded or complicated or layered in ways that feel impossible to explain—I see you. If people don’t understand why a particular date undoes you year after year—I see you.

Your grief is not too much. The fact that multiple losses live at the same address in your heart doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It means you’ve loved deeply, multiple times, in multiple ways. That’s not a failure. That’s a testament.

This December 21st

This Sunday, I’ll probably do what I’ve done in years past. I’ll move slowly. I’ll be gentle with myself. I’ll share memories with my loved ones. I’ll let myself remember without trying to orchestrate the memories. I’ll probably cry. I’ll probably also laugh at some random memory that surfaces. I’ll hold both of them—my friend, my dad—in whatever way feels right that day.

And I’ll trust that this is enough. That remembering is holy work. That grief and love, coupled and doubled, stays with us, reshaping us, teaching us how to live with absence and presence at the same time.

If December 21st (or any date) holds this kind of weight for you, may you find what you need. May you be gentle with yourself. May you trust that your grief is as unique as your love, and both are sacred.

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How do you mark the anniversaries of loss? What helps you honor what cannot be fixed?