Lately I've been carefully reminding myself to prepare for the emotional onslaught of Christmas Eve, which seems to catch me off guard every year.
The first one without Thomas I spent cleaning - manically cleaning - and sobbing. It has not gotten much better. But that's because I kept forgetting how shittastic Christmas Eve is, for some reason. It's fresh agony each year thanks to my surprising inability to retain useful information like: CHRISTMAS EVE SUCKED LAST YEAR BECAUSE I WAS VERY, VERY SAD.
As the years have passed there's been noticeably less frenzied cleaning activity on Christmas Eve (of course that would be the first thing to go...), but there's still a debilitating amount of very raw sorrow in my heart on the 24th.
It's such a little kid day - my most favourite day of the year when I was small. So much magic in the air. So much promise. So much to look forward to.
And now, of course, there's markedly less magic and promise in my life. And the sorts of things I look forward to are having a schooner of wine when I get home from taking my dad to the hospital, or knowing there's a chocolate bar My Beloved has stashed away in the freezer for me.
See? Wine and chocolate. And I was going to mention something about fleece sheets, but that's just too obvious.
So I've been reminding myself that Christmas Eve is coming, pain and all, because I think maybe if it doesn't sneak up on me, it might not be as bad as usual.
Plus this year I'll be spending some of it in dialysis with my dad - which isn't necessarily merrier, but, well, different. And different is good, I find. Even when the different is actually bad, different.
I don't know for sure if being prepared will help at all - but at least I'm doing something beside waiting to wake up on Christmas Eve to a crushing sadness I'd forgotten would come.
5 comments:
I'm sorry Christmas Eve is so difficult for you and I wish I had some way to change it. Different is good - even bad different - so keep that in mind for the future.
It'll be good to be with your dad. Christmas Eve was one of my dad's favorite holidays ... he always had us celebrate "réveillon," which was scaled down for us to a special party with cookies and sparkling cider. The word itself means "waking," partly because you stay awake past midnight, but also because you wake to a new dawn, a new hope. Though there's no magic that will change the past, I hope that you will "wake" on Christmas Eve, too, to find yourself facing a new day that may be, perhaps, a little more hopeful than the one before, even if it looks different than you might have expected it to be.
Wine, chocolate, and fleece sound pretty nice...for what that's worth.
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Christmas Eve is a big deal in my family -- my grandmother was Swedish & we always had a big dinner (fish -- though not lutefisk, thankfully!! lol) & opened our presents that night (then opened stockings & had turkey on Christmas Day). Within less than two years, we lost not only Katie (the promise of Christmases future) but both my grandparents (Christmas past -- my grandfather was with me every single Christmas of my life). Christmas Eve has never been quite the same since then, & I always get a little teary-eyed thinking of them all. And I don't like to think about what the Christmases of the future might be like, when my mom & dad aren't here anymore. But I still do manage to enjoy it, for the most part. I will be thinking of you & Mrfitzita this Christmas Eve. (((hugs)))
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