2016 "The Good and the Bad"

Snapdragons grow through a broken sandbag

A note from an old friend, entitled "2009 'The Good and the Bad'", appeared in my Facebook memories this morning. It was a deeply personal and unflinching account of a difficult year, but despite that, the note ended positively and with gratitude.

2016 has been a very difficult year.

It will always be the year my sister died. I feel I exist in this Schrödinger's cat exercise where my sister is dead and I am grieving interspersed with moments where I forget and all is well. 

The latter is fleeting, because I know my sister is dead. I watched her die. I felt the utter absence of the electric thrum of her pulse through the fistula in her arm. I watched the man who loved her for the last two decades do the same.

When speak of her passing, I say she was unable to live any longer, which is true, but I suppose that is true of everyone who dies.

My sister was my hero. She was one of many heroes that died this year.

We lost a poet and a princess, stardust and metal, a Greek god and a prince, a beloved villain and a stinging butterfly. Our mockingbird fell silent.

We lost the lives of tens of thousands of men, women, and children to wars with no winner.

We saw reason and self-interest abandoned for false promises and false messiahs: $350 m a week to NHS! Make America Great Again!

We expanded our vocabularies to include "alt right" and "post truth", defining things that should not exist.

Dark days for sure, but as the poet said, "There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

For everything that is awful in the world, there are people the world over trying to make things better. From the leaders who open their borders to the doctors and nurses without them, all the way to the grandmother knitting mittens for refugees, there is light.

There are people willing to stand up and say I am my brother's keeper.

In my own darkest days of the year, I was enveloped in the exquisite care and compassion of strangers. The women who cared for my sister extended that care to us as we waited for the end. For that, and for having witnessed their love and affection for my sister, they have my eternal esteem.

There is hope, even in the worst of it. I have hope that the fighting will stop. I have hope that peace and love will prevail over violence and hatred. I have hope that recent electoral upsets, while devastating, will put an end to apathy and inspire engagement among the disillusioned for a better future.

There is compassion. If there is a New Year's resolution I could make for the world, it's that we all try to be a bit kinder and a bit more understanding than we were yesterday.

And there is love. When the priest shook my hand at my sister's burial I was crying. He said that tears were a representation of how much we care. This year has presented no shortage of things to cry about, but it has also seen us united in shared grief.

Grief is a crack inside us, it lets the light, the love we feel, shine outward.