I've been wrestling with Christmas this year.

For most of my life the holiday season has meant nothing but joy, family, laughter and belonging. As a child, I was blessed to feel safe, loved and when our ever-expanding clan gathered noisily around the Christmas dinner table, a part of something larger than myself. As an adult and a parent, I have been lucky enough to bestow upon and share those same experiences with my own children.

As I have moved through life, my Christmas joy has morphed into something subtler and more vicarious, but nonetheless potent. It has always been there when I needed it. Happily and generously offering its healing balm and, like a family lodestone, drawing us together, if only for a little while, and reminding us that, in spite of everything, our similarities still outweigh our differences.

I still believe that. I still believe in that. I think most of us do, or want to. Which makes family estrangements all the more difficult to get our heads and hearts around. The reality is, however, that people change, families splinter and grow fractious. Sometimes they grow back together and sometimes they don't. And as much as we might like to keep things the same, we cannot. And we should not. Life is growth and sometimes growth is painful. However, life is also finite.

A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to visit with John and Jo-Ann Bolger and their beautiful daughter Lindsay. From the minute I crossed the threshold into their home, I was struck by how much love there was in that place. The house was beautifully decorated for Christmas, John and Jo-Ann were smiling and kind and attentive to me, a relative stranger, and all the while their precious Lindsay lay dying in a hospital bed in a room just off the kitchen.

After a remarkably inspiring, half-decade battle with brain cancer, an exhausted Lindsay is finally flagging. Medicated, asleep and under the watchful care of a smiling, palliative nurse, her labored breaths were the counterpoint to one of the loveliest encounters I've ever had.

Above the deep and abiding sadness that I knew both John and Jo-Ann must wrestle with continually, there burned a much brighter emotion. Love. They talked about Lindsay with nothing but love. They stroked her withered, blanketed legs and thinning hair with love. They talked about the love she had shown them and continued to show them through her courage and humor. They glowed with it. And it was infectious.

I found myself looking at the wasted angel in the bed and not fretting over or lamenting her struggles, not cursing the disease that was claiming her. But simply loving her. Loving her spirit, loving her lessons, loving her legacy. And silently thanking her for reminding me of what, after all, we are here for and how brief our time here is.

And as I drove home, and indeed for many days since, I have been thanking John and Jo-Ann for helping me with my Christmas this year. If they, faced with the inexplicable loss of a daughter, are still able to see the blessings in their lives, are still able to exist with such love in their hearts, then perhaps there is yet hope for the rest of us who are muddling our way through our own family issues.

Lindsay Bolger passed away peacefully, surrounded by her wonderful family, the day after my visit. Whatever happens within my own wonderful family this holiday, I know that on Christmas Day I will spend at least a moment or two thinking of Lindsay and all the Bolgers and thanking them for their gift.