My angel was sitting on top of my statue of St. Joseph’s these past few days she was obscured by the snow. The sun came out yesterday and she appeared on St. Joseph’s head. I was surprised to see her.

These are the dark days up where I live, and for people like us – color and light people – they can be gloomy and ghostly. Until the Winter Solstice, they will get darker and shorter, and then the path to brightness begins.

These are the challenging days for me, and for Maria. My daughter sent me one of those anti-depression lights a few years ago, I turn it on this time of year.

The blackness is so very black.

I waded out through the snow to take the angel’s photo, and when I walked past, I saw images in my head of my mother and father, both dead, and my brother, still alive, and my sister, also alive and living in a remote corner of upstate New York.

Maybe it was the angel, maybe the holidays, maybe the dark days.

I felt some jarring vibes out there near the angel, some mojo that stirred up ghosts.

I had to give up on trying to have a relationship with my brother, who is older than I am and insists we have always been close and says he misses his little brother.

Since I’ve only spoken to him two or three times in the past 30 or 40 years, I don’t find this sincere or credible.

My heart is closed to it.

My life is not a Hollywood movie, and the ending of family stories for me is not one of reconciliation, tears, and enduring love and forgiveness, as it always is in the movies. That is just not the story of my family.

Maria has also moved away from most of the people in her family, this is a pain we both share. The broken family people are a kind of community, especially during the holidays. We recognize one another, we understand the there are all kinds of endings in life.

When it doesn’t work out with family,  that is a heartbreak for the secret society of people who leave their families behind to save their own souls. I don’t want to sugar coat it.

I will never get over not seeing my mother once during the final years of her life. But I do know it was something I had to do.

Sad endings are not necessarily the end of our stories.

We can have happy endings too.

I saw my brother a few years ago and vomited in the restaurant bathroom for a half-hour. I told Maria afterward that I couldn’t imagine why, and she just looked at me as if I had gone mad.

And this was after 30 years of therapy.

The space between us is just dead for me, I can’t bring it to life and have let it go. Nor can I pretend it’s there. And I no longer ever lie to myself or other people.

My sister is another story.

We rarely see each other but often speak to one another, and there is much love and understanding between us. We alone bear witness to the lives of one another, and that is a bond that will never be broken.

I worried about her for years, and I learned not to do that.

Worry is not love, it is something else. When I gave up worrying about my sister, we got close again.

I last visited her several years ago, we both are easier speaking on the phone. She doesn’t ever travel and won’t leave her dogs alone or with anyone else. Her house is not simple to visit.

There is a sadness for this, for sure, and a joy.

My sister and I are the remnants of a shattered family that could never pull itself out of dark holes. It’s sad to have a brother I will probably never seen again in this world.

But she and I are not shattered, we are reborn and in a spiritual sense,  resurrected.

It’s joy to have moved behind this sadness and pain to find love and happiness and meaning.

There is just no good place for me to be with the ghosts of my family, I don’t care how the movies end, or what the angels may be trying to tell me.

Creativity has saved my soul and put me on the path to sunshine and light.

I am where I need to be, and want to be, and was meant to be. Perhaps that is the message of the angel.

My sister has chosen to live in a quiet and isolated place and she loves her life with her dogs, she takes good care of herself and is strong and enduring. Otherwise, she would not be alive. She is happy and fulfilled, where she needs to be, not where I might think she should be.

That was a good and hard lesson for me – I don’t know how other people should live.

I don’t know why the images of my family came up around my angel, if you believe in angels, there’s a message for me there, but I don’t really know what it is. Or even if it is real.

Someone reminded me that a few years ago, walking in the woods, I saw the faces of my family staring back at me through the trees, they were powerful and unsettling images. I wrote about it but don’t remember it.

Family never really leaves us, I think, although we sometimes have to leave them. Whatever happens to me, I feel my life has already had its happy ending, I am fortunate and blessed in ways I never expected.

And grateful for every day of my life.

But my family is not marked by happy endings, and in order to survive, I had to leave them behind.

But I felt affirmed in my choice about family. Some people can work it out, some people can’t. I don’t judge people either way. And Hollywood has never made much money telling the truth about people’s lives.

We are taught in our culture that family is everything and that we can never really let it go. At this time of year, I feel a kinship with the broken family people. This is when it seems to hurt the most. My heart goes out to you.

There is no one way to deal with something like this, despite the pressure from the preachers of conventional wisdom. We are all so different, we have to do what we have to do.

And we need to know that this is okay, we have the right to do what we have to do.

Sometimes you just have to let it go and get on with life. Life is, in fact, a mystery, and it is important to understand and acknowledge that I have very few answers.