Ho Ho Horrible

'Tis the season to be jolly.  It's the holiday season.  Everyone is supposed to rush around with a smile on their face, right?  The colors seem brighter, happier.  Unless you've had a loss that drains all color and turns the light to darkness.  Then it all seems to be washed in particularly painful shades of gray fading to black.  The holidays are anything but happy for those in mourning. 

People's expectations that you have happy holidays makes this time a year more painful for many people.  It's hard to feel thankful at Thanksgiving when all you feel is the black hole of where your loved one ought to be.  2010, the year I lost my baby, all I could feel was that black hole, that bloody hole where my heart used to be, sucking all light, all color, all flavor out of the world.  It's hard to taste turkey and pie around the flavor of blood that tints everything.

Those who haven't had that world-rocking, earth-shattering caliber of loss simply don't understand how this works.  Your struggle with the holiday confuses them many times.  It seems like your failure somehow that you haven't "gotten over it" yet.  Some people outside the miasma of your loss  try to understand.  Some have gone through it and really do understand.  But so many don't.  And their expectations for your joy feel like that one more burden you can't carry. 

I've seen it again and again.  My husband lost his mother just over 20 years ago on the 16th of December.  For him, she was Christmas.  To this day, every Christmas feels like a soul-sucker.  He struggles to find things to be grateful for since his holidays have been buried in the cold ground for over two decades.  He loves us, but that doesn't stop his clinical depression that gets worse in the dim, short days from feeling all the more acute during "the most wonderful time of the year."  I've talked to multiple people this year who feel the same about the holidays as we did and, to some extent, still do.

Neither my husband or I felt even sort of merry December 2010.  Every song about babies or birthing brought burning tears to my eyes.  Since then, I've been clawing my way back through finding ways to serve others for myself and my family and then putting slips of paper with acts of service printed on them into a jar for my angel.  These are to be opened and read on Christmas morning.  My holidays do almost feel merry again these seven years later.  But my husband still feels the darkness in a way that overshadows everything else.  I respect that. 

There's no easy fix for this.  The holidays just make everything feel harder, more burdensome, for many people.  All many of those who are in mourning ask is that they be allowed to mourn and feel in their own way, in their own time.  Please don't try to force your smiley face on someone else.  Don't add to that burden.  Just be there.  That's enough.  And if you're there and sharing your love and support, you may see a smile after all. 

A song for the season

I have heard of at least three local stories of women losing their babies in the last 24 hours.  Their Christmas season will ever more be colored by trauma and loss. One would like to think of this as a season of joy, love and laughter, but there are so many ghosts of Christmas past haunting many of us that it's sometimes hard to feel the joy or want to laugh.  Sometimes, it's even hard to care.  My husband's mother was the spirit of Christmas for him, yet she died a week before the holiday.  Every Christmas since has been dimmed by this loss, and that was 20 years ago or more.  And the loss doesn't have to occur during the season to cast a shadow on every holiday for years to come.  I mentioned this holiday issue in my last blog.

For the first four years after Allie's loss, I felt a compulsion to reach out to people, to find as many people as possible I could serve and for whom I could buy Christmas gifts.  I wanted to help people have a better holiday, but almost more, I wanted to survive the holiday season without my baby, with a silence where there should be laughter of my third child.  And it helped.  It carried me through to New Years.  And for Christmas every year for the rest of my life, I will fill a jar for my angels as their gift from me, a jar with all the service we as a family have done throughout the holidays and the year.  We read each slip on Christmas in place of a little five-year-old and her younger siblings opening dolls or bears  It makes for a meaningful climax after the present unwrapping is done.

I still reach out and help, but it's more for others now.  I no longer cry as much when I hear songs about angels and babies, though occasionally, tears still come.  I still identify most with Christmas songs about the experience of motherhood, like "Mary Did You Know," Amy Grant's "Breath of Heaven," and "What Child Is This?"  I also like "Christmas Shoes" because it starts to reach the sadness and joy of the season.  Even though I've heard them multiple times, I often cry mourning or healing tears on hearing them.

I found a fairly new song yesterday that makes me cry just to think about it.  I can't mention its name without crying, but it's a good kind of tears, healing tears.  The song moved me in a way most Christmas songs don't.  And I don't even generally listen to country.  It's called "Broken Hearts like Mine" by Cherie Call.  It hits on the pain of the season for those in mourning, but also on the healing nature of the reason for the season.  I thought I'd share it with those out there who may experience the holiday through a similar lens of mourning.  The song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pGNFXCq2pY  I know we all can find healing through Him.  That was part of the purpose for his atonement and resurrection, was to understand our pain and help us heal.  We just need to reach out, and he will be there for all of us.  I wish everyone, in spite of the pain, a joyous or at least peaceful season.

Happy Thanksgiving?

Holidays are always the hardest.  I can endure by forgetting most of the time.  I survive by keeping busy.  I made it okay through the death of another cat, my kittens' mama I'd taken under my wing.  I make it through days that are dull or hard or exhausting.  I can smile.  I can laugh.  I can focus on this moment.  Then a holiday comes along.  And the fineness, the smile, the ability to feel like I'm becoming whole again goes away.  And I'm left missing her again.  I'm left facing another important day without her here, at least so I can see her.  She would have been five and a half, old enough to love the pie and the turkey and hate the green beans and laugh and play with her cousins.  And that empty hole that used to have my Alamanda in it feels so empty, so lonely, so lost.  I will smile tomorrow.  But tonight, this blog sums it up for me: Sad blog.