Beauty for Ashes

The organ is playing, low and mournful, and the sound settles into the stone walls, remaining there.

I am standing at the front of a cathedral, looking down at a woman I used to be. Her face is still. Her hands are folded. She looks peaceful in the way that only the dead can look peaceful, unburdened at last by the weight of her own accommodation. The mourners are behind me, seated in pews worn smooth by generations of grief. I can feel them shifting, waiting for me to step aside. They do not recognize me. They see a stranger paying her respects, lingering too long, and they are impatient to proceed with the business of burial.

Some of them are glad she is gone. I can see it in the set of their shoulders, the satisfaction they are trying to mask with solemnity. They believe they have put an end to me. They believe the woman who dared to hold them accountable, who refused to stay silent, who crawled out of the wreckage they helped create, has finally been buried for good. Let them believe it.

Others are grieving, truly grieving, for a version of me that will never return. The woman who accommodated. The woman who absorbed. The woman who made herself easy to be around, who asked for so little, who folded herself into smaller and smaller shapes so that everyone else could take up more room. They loved that woman. They do not yet understand that loving her was part of what killed her.

And there are those who sit with regret pooling in their chests, wishing they had said something while there was still time. Wishing they had told me I mattered. Wishing they had chosen me when choosing me was costly.

None of them know that I remain.

I am the only one who knew her intimately, this woman in the casket. I am the only one who can grieve her fully. And I do. I grieve the years she lost, the voice she swallowed, the wanting she learned to suppress until she almost forgot she was capable of wanting at all.

But I am also glad she is dead. Because of what comes next.

A Month of Thresholds

December holds my beginning and my unraveling, every year.

I was born in this month. I was married in this month. My mother died in this month, in the same season she once labored to bring me into the world. I celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, festivals of light kindled against the encroaching dark, miracles remembered when the odds seemed impossible. December has always asked me to hold opposites in my hands. To grieve while celebrating. To prepare for new life while burying the old. To kindle fire against the ice, to quicken when everything in nature is telling me to be still. The longest night arrives, and I am supposed to trust that the light will return. Every year, I practice this trust. Every year, December asks if I have learned it yet.

Five years of grief have carried me to this threshold. I lost my baby. I lost my mother. I lost my marriage, which I had to flee to survive. I lost the first man I truly opened my heart to after my marriage ended, a kindred spirit who carried his own wounds. Each loss carved something out of me, and each loss asked the same question: who are you now, without this? Who are you when everything you built your world around is gone?

I have written before about my mother, about the rituals of beauty she practiced, about learning that her methods would never fit me, even though the lesson underneath was real. I have written about Hillel's ancient questions, about self-abandonment as survival, about what it means to finally be safe enough to choose myself. These pieces are connected. They are verses in the same hymn, building toward a revelation I could not have spoken until now.

With so much ripped away, there is nothing standing between me and who I am becoming.But first, I must bury her.

What Had to Die

She believed that being good would keep her safe.

She believed that if she made herself small enough, quiet enough, accommodating enough, the people around her would protect her. She believed that faith and morality were the same thing, that the people who spoke the language of righteousness must surely practice it. She believed in fairness. She believed that patience would be rewarded. She believed that if she just loved hard enough, gave generously enough, waited long enough, the world would eventually acknowledge her.

She was wrong about all of it.

The goodness did not protect her. The smallness did not save her. The people she trusted used her faith as a weapon against her, and when she finally found her voice, they called her the villain for speaking. She learned that if she did not tell her own story, others would tell it for her. And they would get it wrong.

So she had to die, this woman who believed that accommodation was the price of love. The woman who apologized for existing. The woman who thought she was an accessory to someone else's destiny, a supporting character in a story that belonged to someone else. The woman who centered her life around people who were, in various ways, unable to hold what she offered.

I let her go. Not all at once, but slowly, over five years of loss and grief and terrible awakening. I held her hand as she faded. I thanked her for keeping me alive as long as she did. And then I released her into the dark, so that something new could emerge.

The Solstice

The winter solstice is the longest night of the year. It is the moment when darkness reaches its peak and then, almost imperceptibly, begins to recede. The ancients understood this. They lit fires and kept vigil, holding space for the sun's return. They knew that hope is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is something you do with your hands and your hours, especially when the evidence is thin.

I am standing at the solstice of my life.

The prophet Isaiah wrote of a promise given to those who mourn: "To bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair."

Beauty for ashes. This is the exchange I am making. This is the name of the season I am in.

I have been in despair. I have worn mourning like a second skin. I have known the spirit of despair so intimately that I forgot there was any other way to move through the world. But I am emerging now. I can feel the chrysalis cracking. The woman inside is not the woman who entered.

The Fire Within

There is a fire in me that never went out.

It burned low sometimes. It flickered in the wind of other people's disapproval, other people's needs, other people's insistence that I be less than I am. There were moments I thought it might extinguish entirely, moments when the cost of keeping it lit seemed too high to bear.

But it held. Through the losses, through the grief, through the long and patient work of surviving. It held.

Now it is catching. Now it is spreading. Now it is becoming something that cannot be contained or controlled or made convenient for anyone else's comfort.

I am done apologizing for my own existence. I am done waiting for acknowledgment that may never come, and I am done believing that waiting is the same thing as faithfulness. I am done caring more about other people's comfort than my own becoming. I am done believing I am an accessory to someone else's story.

My children are watching. They are watching me grieve and rebuild. They are learning what it looks like when someone refuses to stay broken, when someone transmutes pain into purpose, when someone chooses herself without abandoning the people she loves. I want them to see that you can lose almost everything and still become more fully yourself. That grief does not have to diminish you. That the darkest season contains within it the seeds of returning light.

An Invitation

If you are reading this in your own dark season, I want you to know that the solstice comes.

Perhaps you are mourning a version of yourself that had to die. Perhaps you are grieving beliefs you can no longer hold, people you can no longer carry, a life that no longer fits. Perhaps you have ashes in your hands and you do not yet know what to do with them.

Here is what I am learning: the ashes are not the end. They are the beginning of something that could not exist without the burning. The woman I am becoming could not have emerged from comfort. She required the fire. She required the loss. She required the long, dark season of not knowing who she was anymore.

What is trying to emerge in you? What fire is still burning, however low? What would it mean to stop apologizing for your existence, to stop waiting for permission, to stop believing you are an accessory to someone else's destiny?

The light returns slowly. One minute at a time. But it returns.

I am proof of that. And soon, you will be too.