Nothing Gold Can Stay: Grief, Beauty, and Hope in the Season of Christmas

This past Saturday in Orlando, I had the opportunity to see The Outsiders on stage — a story that lingered with me long after the curtain closed. Some stories arrive at just the right moment, meeting us exactly where we are. This one did.

Throughout the Broadway production, Robert Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay is referenced several times, quietly anchoring the emotional undercurrent of the story:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,


Her hardest hue to hold.


Her early leaf’s a flower

;
But only so an hour.


Then leaf subsides to leaf.


So Eden sank to grief,


So dawn goes down to day.


Nothing gold can stay.

Seeing this play during the Christmas season gave the poem a deeper, more personal resonance for me.

For many , myself included this time of year carries both light and heaviness. Christmas is often painted as joyful and whole, yet for those navigating grief, it can magnify absence. An empty chair. A familiar voice no longer heard. Traditions that now feel altered by loss.

In this way, Frost’s poem feels especially poignant. The “gold” isn’t just youth or innocence — it’s the presence of those we love, the moments when life felt full and unbroken. And when that gold changes form or slips away, grief naturally follows.

“So Eden sank to grief.”

That single line holds so much truth. Loss is not a failure of love — it is the cost of having known something beautiful. The grief we feel during the holidays is not something to fix or rush past; it is a reflection of how deeply we cared.

And yet, what I find most comforting about the poem — especially during difficult seasons — is that it does not deny beauty simply because it is temporary. The gold existed. The dawn was radiant. The flower did bloom, even if only for an hour.

There is hope in that.

Christmas, at its heart, is a season of light returning — often quietly, gently, and imperfectly. Hope does not always arrive as joy. Sometimes it comes as remembrance, as gratitude, as the soft realization that love does not disappear just because its form has changed.

I see this reflected again and again in healing work. We don’t heal by erasing grief; we heal by allowing it to coexist with meaning. By honoring what was, while slowly making room for what still is.

Nothing gold can stay but its imprint remains.

For anyone moving through this season with a tender heart: your grief is valid, your memories are sacred, and even in loss, beauty has not abandoned you. It may simply be asking to be seen in a new way.

And perhaps that, too, is part of the light.