This will be our fourth christmas without him. How different things are--not even a real tree like he used to put up, cursing mightily...Whenever our stockings get put up there seems to be an empty space, the way it always went from mine to jen's to my mom's, and then his, but now nothing. It's always sad to see his stocking, which matches my mom's, lying in the bottom of the box, forgotten. The only thing I suppose he'd recognize now would be Cinnanmon sleeping lazily among the gifts, as always. This morning over lunch my mom was telling me how two of the medications he was on when he died are no longer prescribed, one because it just doesn't work and one because it causes heart attacks. As i remarked to her (and anyone who didn't know us would probably have thought this a terrible thing to say), between that, the diabetes, the heart problems, the breathing problems, the stress and god knows whatever else, the man was a walking death sentence! She laughed at that, of course. We all do--it's what he would have done, once upon a time.
They say holidays are the hardest times to remember someone you've lost, but honestly until tonight I hadn't really felt the sadness come back the way it usually does. It's so easy to forget everything, to think for instance that this room, this den has always been mine, that my books have always lined the shelves instead of his, that my traffic cone and my painting and my pictures of my friends have always decorated this space. But then I look up and there is his old baseball glove sitting next to the print Sean gave me for christmas. Perched in front of my giant art history textbook is the name plaque from one of his old offices, back when he was just a regular nuclear engineer, a wood one my grandpa made him. He's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When my mom drove me home last week, I couldn't help but slip into that familiar fantasy, just for a second, as we came up to the driveway and there was a tahoe in the driveway and the light was on in the den, that it really all was a bad dream--that in reality he had just come home from work and was sitting at his desk in the den, that he'd get up to give me a hug when i came in the door. but of course, the tahoe was in the driveway because that's where i left it, and of course it was only my sister in the den. it's an illusion, always, but for just that one second, it is so very nice to believe.
I shouldn't be sad now, I should be happy, because it's christmas and I still have the rest of my family to be thankful for, and later today I'll be with sara and she's my family too, biology aside. I almost feel that I have so much that I'm being disproportionately unhappy over what was taken away. It's just hard. That's the only word for it, I guess. It's hard knowing that most of the people around you have their families intact, whatever their dysfunctions. It's hard knowing are people like me and sara, whose families are just a little bit broken because of that someone who won't be sitting around the tree this morning. Despite five years' worth of rationalizing about how all was for the best, it still comes down to the fact that it's christmas and he's not here. He never will be, that is the hardest thing of all.
I suppose I don't sound very merry at all right now, but I will be, come morning. Sadness is usually fostered late at night, especially when I'm tired. It helps writing it down, even though I've written down a thousand things just like this over the years, many of them in this journal. If I don't write it down, even if I'm already in bed, I'll just lie there thinking about it endlessly, so I'll get up and come downstairs and type. I think I cry more in front of this computer than anywhere else. But then I go back to bed and I think about other things, and it gets better. That's where I'm headed now, dreamland. Goodnight/good morning/merry christmas to everyone...I love you.