Love when nothing can be fixed
This Christmas included both togetherness and loss. This final reflection considers how love shows itself when nothing can be fixed.
This Christmas, love revealed itself most clearly in loss.
Several family bereavements and funerals took place over the festive period. Celebration and sorrow coexisted.
Grief resists productivity. There is no outcome measure for missing someone.
What remains is presence.
When presence is the work
In grief, professional roles fall away. There is no intervention to restore what has gone.
What matters is being with.
People arrived without answers.
They stayed in silence.
They returned again.
This is love enacted.
Ritual and community
Carrying love forward
Funerals are collective occupations. They gather people into shared action, walking, sitting, remembering.
They provide structure when life feels unmoored. They allow grief without demanding resolution.
Love becomes communal.
The Body Remembers
The body remembers care long after words fade.
A meal.
A message weeks later.
A hand on a shoulder.
Love does not remove pain. It makes pain survivable.
Carrying Love Forward
Love is not seasonal. It persists in follow-up, in remembering, in continued presence.
For those in caring professions, this is not extra work. It is the medium through which care becomes meaningful.
What this leaves me attending to
Across these reflections, one question remains:
What do we choose to attend to?
Attention shapes behaviour. Habit shapes character.
The invitation is quiet:
to practise patience,
to value presence,
to understand connection as health.
Why his message still matters
Drummond’s teaching resonates today because it:
shifts spirituality from belief to character
defines success as how we treat others
presents love as a discipline, not a mood
His view of the spirit of humanity is ultimately this: a life becomes fully alive only when it becomes loving.
If love truly is the greatest thing in the world, then tending it may be the most important work we do.
Carols by candle light 2025
Author’s Note
I write these reflections as an occupational therapist and health professional, with a long-standing interest in human behaviour, adaptation, and meaning, particularly in moments of vulnerability, transition, and loss. This is not a clinical or theological series, but a reflective one, written at the intersection of professional understanding and lived experience.
