Maybe you’ve stood in a store, mindlessly running your fingers over the glittery ornaments that seem to be made just for you and your child, but you wonder if you should buy them because…well…
Maybe you’ve stood in that same store, or maybe it’s another one (because you’ve gone to 10,) and cursed everything in your path because try as you might, there exists NO store that carries anything perfectly suited to decorate a four-year old’s headstone for Christmas instead of her play room tree. Maybe you’re crying as you move numbly aisle to aisle, hearing her in your ears and wondering what she would be like today, cringing as the little girl with cat ears and pink boots twirls by.
Maybe you have a rack in your garage like me, with organized bins and shelves full of decorations of the past 3 holiday seasons and now you ache and cry and wonder if anyone really knows what that feels like. That a quarter of your garage is dedicated to storing cemetery decorations because you cannot bear to throw anything away because it’s all you have left; all you have to give anymore. This is life now. This is “normal.”
Maybe the very thought of the holiday tears you in half because you WANT (oh how you want!) to remember the good holidays for a moment or shoot, you’d even be okay remembering the bad ones when chemo threatened to destroy your memories. You’d actually give anything for the bad ones again because they were REAL. They happened. They were actual, real life and now, you can no longer create more of those new, real life memories, hard as they were at the time. And you feel torn because how in the hell can anyone ask you to feel thankful, grateful and blessed when the world has ended and left its mark as ashes at your feet? You know you are all of those things, but you are also and sometimes MORE devastated, isolated and broken?
Maybe you feel one day like it’s okay to be angry, but cry yourself to sleep because you feel AWFUL at being angry because you know it’s so very, very far from what your little girl wants for you. There is a face that others see, but even that is cracking and you feel like screaming and spitting like a caged animal at the rage you feel inside because no one really understands that YES, GOD DAMMIT, IT DOES STILL HURT THIS MUCH!
But then you catch one glimpse of her face in a photo and for a moment, you go back in time. Maybe you close your eyes, but I know you wish with every cell in your body that you could just stay there forever. Or for one second, because even that long would be okay. You relive the “lasts” you experienced with your love over and over again. All of the “befores” and “untils.” You cherish the perfect family photo from that last Thanksgiving that you still get a giggle over because of the blasted turkey carcass in the background that is now part of a larger story and you wonder “how many times did I tell her I love her that day?”
Maybe it’s not your daughter. Maybe it’s not your child at all. Maybe it’s your husband or your mother or a very dear friend. Maybe it’s your first season without them or your 20th. In my third this year, it hurts worse than I expected it to because she’s still gone. And she will be gone for the rest of my life and something about that just can’t be explained to people who just don’t know. Something about that kind of pain longs to be felt, explored, examined, revered and honored, but in doing so you feel you could die from how much it hurts.
If you have read this far, somehow I think we might be feeling the same things this holiday season. I don’t have a Thanksgiving table anymore, but if I did, know that you would belong there. For whatever reason you are hurting this Thanksgiving, I see you. Lord knows I don’t know how to help, but at least you know you aren’t alone in my house and in my world. I’m grateful for those who see me and welcome me with open arms despite how very hard I am to love right now and I pray that you feel the same, even if it’s just from this. I pray for a peaceful and gentle Thanksgiving to those who are hurting and I send you my love all the way to Kate and back.
Kate, I love you. I miss you. Best friends forever. I promise.
