Tags
alone at Christmas, holidays after loss of spouse, no Christmas gift after loss of spouse, Remember the Dragonflies
I didn’t follow my own advice. Dammit.
This was the sixth Christmas without my husband. I didn’t think it would matter any more, and I didn’t buy myself a gift like I have for previous Christmases. But I guess maybe it always will matter. My pre-Christmas blog post, my book — both gave advice about what to do:
“I bought myself a gift and wrapped it … By golly, I had something under that tree … Do it. Be good to yourself. Buy yourself a gift and wrap it and open it Christmas morning. Don’t give yourself a chance to feel so alone in that way on such a special day.”
I spent this year in a home where I’d never been, and I had no wrapped package under the tree. And I felt so alone. I know Christmas is not about gifts and getting. I know that with all my heart. But there were over a hundred gifts under that tree, and everyone got a gift, but me.
Thank goodness, I took the box my son in North Carolina had shipped me and I got to open that on Christmas morning with him on Face Time. He had to work and couldn’t come to the holiday gathering.
I don’t mean to sound whiny and unappreciative and entitled, yet I know I do, but this is real. This is the kind of emotion that the holidays can induce after loss. When someone spends six decades with gifts to open — from Santa Claus and parents and husbands — and then after the death of a spouse, that doesn’t happen any more, it adds heaps of layers of feelings to the original loss. It doesn’t matter what the gift is. It could be a three-dollar candle or a twelve-dollar book or a three-dollar bag of M&Ms. (And I really did get a bag of M&Ms in my stocking, and some Airborne, and I am grateful for that.) The thing is, the lack of a gift or even a card says nobody cares about you.
In the season of Light and Love, nobody has thought about you.
Families, kids, grandchildren need to know that this feeling exists. So in the spirit of all the raw feelings I have shared in the publishing of my book Remember the Dragonflies: A Memoir of Grief and Healing, I throw this one out there, too. And it is not about getting a gift. It is about feeling loved.
If you are above these kinds of lonely or selfish feelings, then you are blessed, a good soul, a saint, and I’m glad for you. I confess I’m not. If you haven’t lost a spouse, you don’t understand this at all, so please don’t judge.
How could I fail myself this year?
I have a year to think about it. Next year I will make sure I am surrounded by Light and Love and shiny and glittering and warm things. I will make myself less easy to be taken for granted. I will not throw myself under the bus. I will take care of myself.