I sat here for an hour trying to come up with a clever headline that captured the emotion of this year without sounding like a broken record or a trite cliche. Joy ended up the only word that constantly came to mind.

Perhaps most people, including myself, wouldn’t consider joy the appropriate sentiment based on the personal craziness that has marked 2009 for not just the crew here at OBE HQ, but for so many other families in the Comox Valley and beyond.

Surely, it is easy enough to say that this past year has been one of tremendous loss and a forced recalibration of what we thought the road ahead looked like.

So many people in the community have lost their livelihoods, their loved ones. So many of us have struggled to make ends meet while coping with public and private darkness.

We have slugged through one hell of a year, only to come out the other end a bit more exhausted and in need of a seriously large influx of that apparently elusive joy.

Over the last roughly 365 days, me and joy – well – we’ve had some personal issues. I tried locking them away, literally, in a box. But, they didn’t want to stay there.

Those issues came in the form of three pieces of white card stock on which the only proof of our son’s life were etched forever – three so-very-tiny sets of footprints that the doctor gave to me last January when Linden died.

For the last year, they sat in that locked away box – both Ken and I unable to reach inside to see.

We knew we were hiding from him. It seemed like the kindest thing to do, for all of us. Would it be best, we thought, to simply tuck them away and let the pieces of that story remain there, in the dark?

For a while, the answer was an adamant “Yes.”

Surely not always gracefully, we chose to work on using our superpowers for good by moving on and doing the whole nose-to-the-grindstone thing.

Then, with my grandmother passing in September, the pieces of who we are and what had happened started to reveal themselves – and the cracks in our hearts turned out to be a whole lot bigger than we let on.

Our sadness had taken over, it was time to go and reclaim some of that joy.

That always seems like such a brilliant idea when you first get all revved up for it, until you realize that what it’s actually code for is taking a big, long, emotional trip into your own darkness to clue in to why life is grim.

So, we pulled out that box and for the first time sat down with those footprints.

It had been so long, but not. A whole year, that seemed like a week. I barely remember it from start to finish. But, looking at that “secret” of ours made us realize that this year changed our family profoundly, forever.

We hadn’t wanted to make people uncomfortable, gave every reason to steer clear of the conversation, kept shying away from the reality of it all – even though reality had come full circle and was now smacking us in our collective heads hard.

We needed to heal, properly.

So, on the day before Christmas I sat down at the dining room table, placed two sets of those footprints in a simple frame.

It was time for joy, for giving ourselves that chance to say goodbye by being able to say hello every day. By sticking with the wonderful mantra “It is not what happens to you that defines who you are. It’s what you do with that experience.”

Every morning now we wander into the dining room for a quiet acknowledgment of those we lost this year and a warm smile knowing that they are still with us.

That piece of Linden gives us that precious bit of joy to take into the next year and the next decade which is all about connection and love.

May 2010 bring you peace, love and of course – joy.

It shows up in the most curious and wonderous and sometimes least expected places.