Holidaze

Early this morning around 3:30 or 4:30, depending on your
predilection for moving clocks an hour back and forth, I woke up and realized that for the first time in 32 years, I will be celebrating the holidays without a partner by my side. This isn't breaking news, since Jenny passed it was always going to be so. But, I hadn't counted the beads on the abacus, at least not consciously.

I started playing Christmas music on November 1. I am decorating today. We have 10-12 or more Rubbermaid storage boxes full of Christmas cheer. We have lights to string across the fence, and others to hang in the house and on the tree.

I've already declared Christmas Eve will be here, at our house. I want everyone here, Jenny's family, my family. We have all the accoutrements relied on every year. I'm buying a 12 foot tree. I'm decorating early, very early.

Jenny was just inches from actively dying on Christmas morning, and I had to admit her that night and leave her alone--because of Covid. I had promised her I wouldn't leave her, but the hospital made me leave. She was so frightened, and the guilt I feel about having to leave has tears rolling down my cheeks as I write. To be dying in slow motion, her fear was almost redolent, almost a material thing. And to be alone. . . Her liver bleed had likely been going on for a while at this time, and despite modern medicine, no one knew until later. They couldn't have done anything, anyway. 

All the pain and confusion over the affair and her treatment of the family during the last few years dissipated, went away, as I lay on bed in the wee hours of the 26th, guilt wracked and worried that she would leave this world alone. In the end, the universe aligned, so I could be by her side as she gasped her final breath. I never imagined the gratitude I felt to be by her side when she died.

So now, wrapped in thick garlands of desiderium, desperately wishing I could have a do over and could have her back, I am hoping that celebrating Jenny's favorite holiday as hard as we can will chase away the pain I am feeling--we are all feeling or going to feel.

If it doesn't work, this simulcrum of "Joy to the World," at least our house will be pretty, and we will be surrounded with the things that brought joy to Jenny and me before we married, and to the kids as they each came into the world.

Comments

  1. CherylNovember 9, 2022 at 1:04 PM

    You will have to force yourself to celebrate. It will be a chore and feel fake. But bit by bit, year by year, actual joy will begin to take the place of the play-acting cheer. You won’t even notice it at first - or maybe ever. But it’s a real fake it ‘til you make it situation. And you WILL make it.

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