As the holidays approach, I expect more pain. It's sort of the nature of the beast when one is in mourning. Being in mourning is kind of like being an alcoholic. Once it's part of your life, it will always be part of your life, no matter how far you move away from what happened before. Unlike just after I lost my baby, I do see the bright colors of the season. I don't cry anymore when I hear songs about pregnancies I won't be having anymore and babies I won't be holding. But I know a lot of people still do.
For a lot of people, the hardest part of the holiday is the expectation by almost everyone around them that this will be "the most wonderful time of the year." But around the holiday for those in mourning lies a pall, a discoloration. To some, it robs all color, all light, all hope, all joy from what's around them. Time may or may not touch that. To others, it's simply a slight dampening, a melancholy as you reflect on what could have been if the loss had not happened. I will sometimes reflect on the hole, the place where my angel Alli would have/could have/should have been. The feeling that the holiday would have been simple delight instead of faulty, shaky contentment.
I see it in my kids, though they probably don't know it. I see their depression and hope it's simply situational. Yet I know at the base of it somewhere is that seed of loss, that feeling that something is off because someone is missing. They'd cite other things, and those other things are probably bigger factors. But many of those bigger factors likely started with the one factor of their world being shaken unexpectedly by the loss of their baby sister when they were tiny and that fear they both dealt with that they could be next.
We'll fulfill our traditions. We'll find joy and laughter. We'll list the things for which we're grateful. We'll keep putting little slips of paper into Alli's jar that speak of the deeds we do in her name to make this holiday season a little brighter for others and, thereby, for ourselves. We'll open our gifts on Christmas morning, including the angel jar. But it will all feel a little off, like it usually does. I just have to remind myself of the reason for the season, that the hope that is easy to lose is in holding her and being a whole and healed family again because Jesus came to the world as a baby, grew up, and felt our sorrows and died that we may overcome death and pain. This is the reason for the colors and the songs and the lights. And if I can remember that, maybe those lights won't seem so dim after all.
