Can Joy and Grief Exist Together?

One week ago today, as I turned the ignition on in my car and prepared to drive home from church, I received the call nobody wants to get. My cherished uncle, the light of my paternal family and a lifelong father figure to me, had died suddenly the night before from a massive heart attack. The hours and days following that moment, when I went from believing he was alive to knowing he was not, were soul-shaking. The depths of my despair and my sense of being more alone in the world seemed unfathomable and I wondered, as my thoughts meandered toward the approaching Advent season and this upcoming “Jubilee” issue, where I would find the energy and motivation to celebrate joy.

Life in these final days of the semester already evokes Yeats’s “widening gyre.” Things are falling apart. The centre is no longer holding. Papers and readings and presentations and exams are piling up and crashing down. Christmas looms, carrying with it not only the rosy glow of colourful lights and nights spent with friends and family but also the weight of unspoken expectations. Mourning, in a season that already feels so heavy, seems too much to contemplate.

But glossing over such a loss would be impertinent. Burying our pain does not make it go away; it allows it to fester and spread like an untreated infection. I have witnessed, in people I love deeply, how unprocessed pain can require anesthetization, often through addictive substances or behaviours. I refuse to go there.

Which leaves me with the question: can joy and grief coexist? Is it possible to begin processing this pain without taking up residence in a house of melancholy, a dwelling that invites a dangerously unbounded stay?

I have reason to believe it might be.

The Christmas season reminds us of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given… And he will be called Wonderful Counselor… Prince of Peace” (New King James Version, Isa. 9.6). This promise is echoed in Matthew 1.23: “‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).” Later in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus—our Immanuel—assures us, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (5.4). And Paul adds to this assurance when he writes, “…you will not grieve like people who have no hope” (1 Thes. 4.13).

Advent creates space to look forward to and celebrate the coming of the Messiah—the Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, our God with us, our source of hope. I do not want to miss out on this gift, not on account of my grief and certainly not because of the busyness of student life or societal expectations. Jesus came, bringing with him the promise of eternal life and, just as importantly, the gift of enjoying life with him now. Allowing ourselves to experience the pain of loss in the context of that love, wrapped in a blanket of his peace, comfort and hope, enables us to hold both emotions simultaneously—grief and joy, loss and gain—and, in doing so, experience both more fully.