It’s the silly season.
This is for all my dear friends that have been or are struggling with loss right now.
Thanksgiving was my mother’s favorite holiday. It’s been over seven years since she passed. It hurts. And it is full of memories. Sweet, bittersweet, full of anger, full of bluck, full of laughter. Coming up right behind this is December. A month during which I lost three children over the course of several years. My Grump’s birthday. My mom’s, right after Christmas.
Yes, the silly season indeed. Eight weeks of compounded gut checks, one happening before I am able to cope with the next.
Very little in my life feels like it did ten years ago. I count that as a blessing and as a source of heart-bleed. I let both happen. I let myself feel both, equally and without shame. I weep for the things that will never feel right again and the hope that slowly died throughout my marriage. I tuck the anger aside until I am alone or with someone close who understands, who will listen without judgement. I ignore the jackasses as best I can. Those who ask me repeatedly how I am doing, or strangers who ask what my plans are for the holidays when what they really want is for me to ask them. Strangers who ask where my kids are.
While I am a very private person, the reasons for it come from being meddled with by those who think they are doing the right thing, because that is what they would want. Not from pain. Not from shame.
I weep for my losses. It was drilled into me that you don’t show anything in public. I have learned that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I have lost. It doesn’t matter that Mom didn’t understand me very well. It doesn’t matter that what was will never be again. Those pieces of pain are still an expression of love.
It took a long time for me to realize that loving my mother didn’t mean I had to make the same decisions she did. I didn’t have to live the life she wanted me to. And, while I would love to extend that same sentiment to my ex, I find that I cannot, because the life-partner or deeply-close friends you choose, you choose to live life together, in some fashion or another. Those are the people I feel you should open your heart to, whether or not you show your love for one another publicly. It has little to do with the wounds being too deep, and yes, they are deep, or that I should find forgiveness.
It has to do with who else is involved- my mother and my children. I can not *not* love them. I can not forget who they are or what they meant to me, or it diminishes not only who I am as a person, but their lives as well. While I do not have to become what my mother wanted, that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her with the whole of my heart. And to really show that love, even now, it means the pain of her loss is with me, too.
No, I can not stop death. I can not change it. I am powerless to stop it from happening. The past is the past. And that is a great comfort. Because while there will never be another Mom, neither can she be taken from me again. While there will never be another Samantha Ann or David, or Gabby, I still have room inside my heart to grow and love, and I still have the love for my children that I do. While Adrian was the love of my life, it did not stop me from loving my ex, and my failed long-term relationship will not stop me from loving another. While I do not have the friends I did as a teenager, I have others- deep close personal friendships that mean more to me than the world and more to me than the endings of those friendships. One drop of love touches another.
Thanksgiving will always be my mother’s favorite holiday. While I miss the turkey and getting up at 5 AM to make meat stuffing with her, and all the humor that went with it, especially when she turned her back on our 17 lb. cat when I went to the bathroom and he tried to take off with a 40 lb bird, I am also grateful that I have those memories. That I no longer have to dress in heels or white linen stockings or wear awful dresses for family get-togethers, forced into a house with people I do not get along with. That I no longer have to answer questions about when I am getting legally married or having children over what should be a pleasant meal. I can simply remember my mother on the couch and attempting eat a sandwich, surrounded by our pets and how they outfoxed her completely. She was overwhelmed and wound up laughing her ass off on the floor, plate flipped over by her feet, and several sets of scurrying noises as bits of bread and meat somehow disappeared or went flying through the air. And now, I have a new Thanksgiving tradition that involves a sandwich. I have other pets that are similar to the ones who have passed. While bread and meat don’t necessarily go flying through the air, there is a lot of purring and happiness. And other chaos that would take too long to write out.
Let your loss be. Be. It is a part of who you are. It doesn’t have to overrun you. And if your choice of dealing with it is practical jokes and laughter, so be it. Grief comes in many forms. We can not live for the dead or the love that was there dies, too, because *we* are the ones ending it, not those who have left. The gut checks will happen, whether you want them to or not. We can, however, take those drops of love that were and continue on, continue to have more, continue to be alive, and continue to remember.
Blessings to all who have lost a child, a spouse, a cherished pet, a parent. You are loved.