Holiday Defeat

Our last Birthday together- Dec 2018

This blog is going to jump all around for me. I do plan on writing about this past year, but right now the holidays have been heavy on my heart. I am just freaking happy I survived it! Call it silly but I honestly thought the holidays wouldn’t get to me. I try and outsmart my mind. Its just dates on the calendar, it’s up to me whether I turn it into something or not, right? Just a day like the other 300 something I have made it through. Sean’s birthday and mine are 4 days apart. The end of November and the beginning of December. I can’t tell you how surreal it felt celebrating another year of my life, with him not by my side. When I was blowing out my candles all I wished was for him to walk through the door. There are still moments where I am in complete disbelief. What do you mean he never came home? How is that possible? How is this my life now? How is it fair that I am here and he is not? Sometimes denial is an easy break from the sadness. I wanted to buy him his favorite carvel ice cream cake. I wanted to eat pizza with him on the couch. I wanted to give him a silly card and tell him how thankful I was he was in my life. But I couldn’t do any of those things. Because there is no one here anymore. A giant hole. That’s all it feels like. Everywhere you go, everything you do there is a giant hole next to you. Milestones like birthdays seem to make that hole bigger.

Once the birthdays subsided, I could feel the wave of Christmas start to form. Sometimes the anticipatory anxiety of an actual event wears you out long before the event comes. There were a few weeks in between when I was on edge. Feeling completely out of control of my emotions. That’s when it is the darkest. When you feel overwhelmed and lost in which direction to move. I was tired from what I had just endured and scared I wouldn’t be able to recover if Christmas hit that hard. And it did. I lost again.

Christmas is like a giant magnifying glass for all the sad parts of your life. Forced cheer for people who aren’t feeling cheerful can be extremely daunting. A big fat sign for everything missing. The “what should have been’s” were staring at me from every corner. The Christmas cards with the cute smiling husband. I had that a few months ago. The baby’s first Christmas announcement. I wanted to become a mom this year. The videos of families on Christmas morning. That was our future. Growing old together. We made those promises to each other. If you let yourself, these can become the obsessive places you get stuck. The sadness, the missed lives. It can swallow you whole if you allow it.

Next, came the New Year. Now instead of forced happiness, it was expected new beginnings. What if I don’t want a new beginning? I want my old life back. I want the easy again. The time with no pain. When life was fun and simple. We met on New Year’s Eve when I was in college. Probably, when we were both in our ‘young and carefree’ prime. I don’t like the term ‘love at first sight’ because love is a lot of hard work, but something very close to that. Intense and extreme connection at first sight. One night together and all of a sudden he was my entire world for 10 years. But now, more time is passing. More time without him here. By next year, even more of him will have faded away from me.

After new years day, I was exhausted. I felt like I had been emotionally beaten up. Completely defeated. The holidays won. That is grief. One obstacle after another. But guess what? Now I can check it off. I survived the dreaded “firsts”. I did recover. The pity party is over and I’m alive again with newfound hope and vitality. Every time I feel like this will be the one I won’t make it through, the one that puts me in the looney bin. But, I always prove myself wrong. Widows are resilient. You throw something at us and we may scream, curse and cry, but never doubt we are facing it head-on.

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When I finally get through the darkness of the defeats, I like to work on my perspective shift. The holidays brought me sorrow but also hope for what my new life can be. Grief forcefully removes your rose-colored glasses and you see life exactly as it is. Thirty-two years on Earth and for the first time the blinders are off. I can feel moments deeper than I ever have. These are the last holiday pictures I will ever have of him. A moment in time. Moments I now cherish far more than I ever thought possible. For some people, this revelation never happens. They go along in their bubbles and they never experience anything that shifts them so violently they have to reexamine their reality. I get envious of those people sometimes, but then I remember I was meant for something different. It is a blessing and a curse. Although, your pain is intense, so is your love. I am seeing that more and more in my life. Grief and pain can magnify the good things if you let it. So this year, I don’t need a new beginning, I need a recreation. Using the old life to transform into the new. Appreciating every moment, past and present, and using the pain as fuel to become whoever it is I want. I remind myself that if my life can go that drastically in the wrong direction in one year, it can go that far in the right direction too. But it is only up to me.