I don’t know what it is about this time of year that makes beauty and pain in all their forms cut straight to the center of my heart. It’s an awful lot like love sickness, a tender appreciation for everything and everyone, which is heartbreaking in its loveliness. Every unkind word would be a knife under the rib if it weren’t tempered by the stunning shadow cast by a tree at dusk.

Maybe it’s our soul’s defense against the phenomenon I like to think of as a “winter shit storm.” It has been my experience in adulthood that the most heartbreaking moments of our lives tend to happen around Christmastime. Maybe our hearts are extra warm so that we can handle hardships with grace, so we can experience pain and loss and feel it more truly. Maybe instead of being angry at what’s hurting your loved ones, it makes you love your loved ones more. Now I don’t really buy into the whole “holiday spirit” thing–don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas, but for me that joy shouldn’t be seasonal. Well, whatever you call it, I’m grateful for a little extra love–both within ourselves and as grace from others–to get us through those moments that might otherwise break us.

A couple years ago on Thanksgiving day my grandfather checked himself into a hospital with double pneumonia, then died the day after Christmas. He lost my grandmother two years prior around Christmastime–lung cancer complicated by double pneumonia. Last Thanksgiving my mother-in-law began her three-month hospital stay during which she was (successfully, thank God) treated for colon cancer. This year my step-mom lost her brother to cancer. Before that, she herself beat cervical cancer.

But the thing about relatively easy-to-treat cervical cancer is that if it comes back, it comes back with a vengeance. Hers did. And it spread to her lungs and brain, sending her, too, to the hospital with double pneumonia. She was about to surrender to it until she was told she may only have three months to live, maybe eleven with continued radiation and chemo. “That’s too short,” she said. Now she’s at home, under the care of a respice nurse (hospice care, but with advanced directives) and my loving dad. While I hate that this is happening to my dear stepmother, the thing that really gets me is what it must be doing to my dad to see first his mother, then his father, and now his wife in the same hospital bed in his living room, being taken from him. I’m angry at the cancer for bringing pain to my family over and over again.

I’m angry because I’m powerless. I can pray fervently. I can try my damnedest to be a better daughter. I can hope that science does whatever it can. But I can’t do anything to make the pain stop. This is why (while it’s still it’s own kind of pain) I’m very happy to experience the kind of beauty that brings me to tears. It reminds me not to despair, and to be strong enough to share hope with those whose pain is from an entirely other source. It reminds me that life is too short not to love with every fiber of my being.