My Running with Grief blog is slowly chronicling the first
13 months after I lost my 44 year old husband (Gordie) and how I used running
to pull myself and my two young sons through grief. However, tonight I found myself compelled to write about Christmas
five years after our loss.
As I will write about in other chapters, after you lose
someone people will soon start asking “is it getting better?” It’s kind of an insane question but it’s,
generally, asked out of love. When
my friends and family ask me this question, it’s because internally they are
desperately hoping I will say yes.
They love me and they want to know that my destroyed life is getting
better.
There is another group of people who ask me this
question…the people who have lost husbands, wives, children, parents, and other
loved ones. They ask it a little
bit differently.
“Does it get better?” they ask.
They also desperately want me to say yes because they can’t
imagine living with the level of pain they are currently experiencing for the
rest of their lives.
Here is the honest answer.
It never gets easier.
It never gets better. But
you learn to live with it. And you
make a choice on how it’s going to affect your life, your days, and things like
Christmas. I will talk more about
making a choice as I release chapters from those 13 months following Gordie’s
death. But for this chapter, I
will talk about the Christmas choice my sons and I make each and every year.
For the fifth time since Gordie died, I have chosen to do
whatever I can to make this a festive, happy, magical time of year for my
sons. Even when I just want to go
to bed, pull the covers over my head, and stay there until January 2nd.
My sons were ages six and
two when Gordie died. There was no
fucking way that I was going to rob them of what Christmas should be: magical, celebratory, and fun and I
still feel that way today. My kids
got screwed when their Dad died.
As long as I have control over it, they will never get screwed out of a
magical Christmas season.
I have strategically created a balance of traditions that
are a mix of traditions BGD (before Gordie’s death) and traditions AGD (after
Gordie’s death). Even though I
felt like clinging to the past in that first Christmas of our new life, I felt
it was important to create some new traditions to help my sons and me move
forward. Five years in, my sons
look forward to the old and the new traditions.
Are there tough moments and days this fifth Christmas season
of our new lives? Absolutely. The worse one for me is when I take the
Christmas totes down from the garage shelves and open the one with Gordie’s
stocking. It nearly leveled me the
first Christmas after he died. Five
years later, it was the same. I
opened the tote, saw the stocking, lost my breath, sat on the cold garage floor
and cried…hoping the boys would not walk out.
There are tons of other things that still suck and there are
so many moments that, year after year, make me silently whisper I wish you were here: watching the kids sit on Santa’s lap, reading
their Christmas lists, deciding what gifts to purchase for them, watching their
school Christmas plays, decorating the tree, and putting the Santa presents out
on Christmas Eve. There are so
many things I miss and would pay heaps of money to be able to do again like begging
him to put the lights on the house even when it’s snowing like heck outside,
watching him watch his favorite movie The Christmas Story and laughing at him
laughing at his favorite parts, and giving him the carrot to bite into and then
throw on the lawn so it looks like a reindeer ate it. Similarly, there are lots of hard moments for the boys, particularly
Nathan since he has memories of the Christmas season with Gordie. I see it on his face when he finds one
of Gordie’s ornaments in the tote as we decorate the tree. I know what he’s thinking when he hears
about Father/Son football games on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day. And I know that Wyatt is desperately
looking for a connection with Gordie when he begs me to tell him the same
Gordie Christmas stories year after year.
So, no, in the absolute, it has not gotten better. Even though our lives have moved
forward and there are new people in them that make us happy, it’s still not the
Christmas Season the three of us want.
But here’s the thing. We
have two choices: we can be
miserable through the Christmas season and long for the past, or we can choose
to be happy and make the most of the Christmas season that we have been
given. The boys and I chose the
latter that first awful year that Gordie died and we continue to make that
choice every Christmas. We make
cookies, we decorate the house inside and out with BGD and AGD decorations, we
continue our Advent tradition from when Gordie was here, we drive around and
look for crazy Christmas lights, we watch Gordie’s favorite Christmas Story
movie, we spend a night in the city, and we bring a small potted Christmas tree
to Gordie’s headstone. And I
run. A lot. Five years later, I still cry on some
of those runs. But, not all the
time. Progress.
Most importantly, we laugh and we celebrate. The boys’ excitement for Christmas
morning builds as each December day ticks by and culminates with them waking up
ungodly early on Christmas morning, running to the door of my room, jumping up
and down (mostly Wyatt) and yelling “can we go out there Mom?”
So, even though we would pick a different Christmas season
if we had one Christmas wish, we are just like most people. We look forward to the Christmas season
year after year and we have a blast.
We don’t hang Gordie’s stocking though. The boys wanted to that first
year. I just could not do it. It makes me so sad to look at that
stocking. I’m not sure why. So, every year, I close the tote with
Gordie’s stocking in it, put it back on the shelf, wipe my eyes and go back
into the house to finish decorating.
I have a magical Christmas to get started on.
