My Running with Grief blog is slowly chronicling the first 13 months after I lost my 44 year old husband (Gordie) and how I used running to pull myself and my two young sons through grief. However, tonight I found myself compelled to write about Christmas five years after our loss.
As I will write about in other chapters, after you lose someone people will soon start asking “is it getting better?” It’s kind of an insane question but it’s, generally, asked out of love. When my friends and family ask me this question, it’s because internally they are desperately hoping I will say yes. They love me and they want to know that my destroyed life is getting better.
There is another group of people who ask me this question…the people who have lost husbands, wives, children, parents, and other loved ones. They ask it a little bit differently.
“Does it get better?” they ask.
They also desperately want me to say yes because they can’t imagine living with the level of pain they are currently experiencing for the rest of their lives.
Here is the honest answer.
It never gets easier. It never gets better. But you learn to live with it. And you make a choice on how it’s going to affect your life, your days, and things like Christmas. I will talk more about making a choice as I release chapters from those 13 months following Gordie’s death. But for this chapter, I will talk about the Christmas choice my sons and I make each and every year.
For the fifth time since Gordie died, I have chosen to do whatever I can to make this a festive, happy, magical time of year for my sons. Even when I just want to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and stay there until January 2nd. My sons were ages six and two when Gordie died. There was no fucking way that I was going to rob them of what Christmas should be: magical, celebratory, and fun and I still feel that way today. My kids got screwed when their Dad died. As long as I have control over it, they will never get screwed out of a magical Christmas season.
I have strategically created a balance of traditions that are a mix of traditions BGD (before Gordie’s death) and traditions AGD (after Gordie’s death). Even though I felt like clinging to the past in that first Christmas of our new life, I felt it was important to create some new traditions to help my sons and me move forward. Five years in, my sons look forward to the old and the new traditions.
Are there tough moments and days this fifth Christmas season of our new lives? Absolutely. The worse one for me is when I take the Christmas totes down from the garage shelves and open the one with Gordie’s stocking. It nearly leveled me the first Christmas after he died. Five years later, it was the same. I opened the tote, saw the stocking, lost my breath, sat on the cold garage floor and cried…hoping the boys would not walk out.
There are tons of other things that still suck and there are so many moments that, year after year, make me silently whisper I wish you were here: watching the kids sit on Santa’s lap, reading their Christmas lists, deciding what gifts to purchase for them, watching their school Christmas plays, decorating the tree, and putting the Santa presents out on Christmas Eve. There are so many things I miss and would pay heaps of money to be able to do again like begging him to put the lights on the house even when it’s snowing like heck outside, watching him watch his favorite movie The Christmas Story and laughing at him laughing at his favorite parts, and giving him the carrot to bite into and then throw on the lawn so it looks like a reindeer ate it. Similarly, there are lots of hard moments for the boys, particularly Nathan since he has memories of the Christmas season with Gordie. I see it on his face when he finds one of Gordie’s ornaments in the tote as we decorate the tree. I know what he’s thinking when he hears about Father/Son football games on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day. And I know that Wyatt is desperately looking for a connection with Gordie when he begs me to tell him the same Gordie Christmas stories year after year.
So, no, in the absolute, it has not gotten better. Even though our lives have moved forward and there are new people in them that make us happy, it’s still not the Christmas Season the three of us want. But here’s the thing. We have two choices: we can be miserable through the Christmas season and long for the past, or we can choose to be happy and make the most of the Christmas season that we have been given. The boys and I chose the latter that first awful year that Gordie died and we continue to make that choice every Christmas. We make cookies, we decorate the house inside and out with BGD and AGD decorations, we continue our Advent tradition from when Gordie was here, we drive around and look for crazy Christmas lights, we watch Gordie’s favorite Christmas Story movie, we spend a night in the city, and we bring a small potted Christmas tree to Gordie’s headstone. And I run. A lot. Five years later, I still cry on some of those runs. But, not all the time. Progress.
Most importantly, we laugh and we celebrate. The boys’ excitement for Christmas morning builds as each December day ticks by and culminates with them waking up ungodly early on Christmas morning, running to the door of my room, jumping up and down (mostly Wyatt) and yelling “can we go out there Mom?”
So, even though we would pick a different Christmas season if we had one Christmas wish, we are just like most people. We look forward to the Christmas season year after year and we have a blast.
We don’t hang Gordie’s stocking though. The boys wanted to that first year. I just could not do it. It makes me so sad to look at that stocking. I’m not sure why. So, every year, I close the tote with Gordie’s stocking in it, put it back on the shelf, wipe my eyes and go back into the house to finish decorating. I have a magical Christmas to get started on.