When Christmas is Sad

My Take on Holiday Sadness

A huge hurt builds inside me.  My father died on Christmas Day 1986.   It is a familiar, old hurt.  This past year freshly layered that hurt with new hurts and loss.  All four of my brothers have passed on.    One in 1998,  another in 2005.  Mom died in 2007.  Then I quickly lost my last two brothers in the Autumn of 2014 and the Summer of 2015.  My remaining sisters-in-law passed on in the years shortly after that..  The last biological relative of the generation beyond me, my father’s youngest sister, died in March of 2017.

Though these family deaths spanned much of this century, it seemed constant, this always losing someone.

No one tells you what the odds of ending up alone are. Being the remaining  person in your family of birth are fairly high, if you were the youngest person in your family;  It can really suck to be the youngest sibling in a family especially if there is a wide age gap between you and your siblings, or if your parents were in the last years of fertility when you were born.  And it really does suck to have had your dad die on Christmas Day.

Death plays on my mind differently this year as it does every year.

Another person I once loved also died in a the days before Christmas.  I did not know that the person I lived with for 13 years, spanning my 20s, my youth, died, apparently unexpectedly, just past a mid-December on my daughter’s wedding day. Some of my friends knew of his death and did not tell me.   The Holiday season deaths seem to stack up.

Our ever-so-long-ago break-up did not go well, so to speak, and I was dead to him after 1988.  I respected his wishes and never contacted him.  The weird thing is that he stopped interacting with anyone who knew me too.  That hurt a lot of people who had considered him a close friend.

Those same friends who he wrote off  due to their connection to me, chose to keep me unaware of his passing until the week after my daughter’s wedding on the day after Christmas.  That was quite considerate actually.  Old friends who came to the wedding celebrated only the couple, and talk of mortality was nowhere to be found on that joyous occasion.

I have my dear hubster, a wonderful daughter and son-in-law and I have an amazing and talented step-daughter, her husband and their twin teenage daughters.  I am not alone.  There is much sweetness surrounding my bittersweet memories of Christmases Past.

I am in my 60s.  My mother lived to be 92.  I could live for a long time as the only one who remembers my childhood family holidays.  Childhood memories of fall and winter get-togethers have become cloudy  through time.  There is no one left to shine sunlight through the clouds on old stories, desserts, family jokes, no one to laugh with about family eccentricities.  I can tell the stories to my children and grandchildren, and I do,
but there is just no way around it.  Losing a loved one is sad.

Actions That May Help Make Christmas – a Little – Better

Holidays can be very, very tough.  I know I’m not the only one who feels this.  But there are a host of other ways to redirect my attention, remember fondly, and create new memories.

Some of the things I do that seem to help when I’m feeling down:

• Be kind.
• Ask people how they are doing.
• Smile.
• Give hugs.
• Take it easy, don’t do more than you want to, or can, do.
• Allow yourself a good cry if needed, don’t cut it short.
• Then dust yourself off and do something to make someone else happy.
• Find an activity that brings you cheer.
• Allow the cheer of others to creep into you.

We can learn to have a sadness and to be happy at the same time. Life is bittersweet for those blessed with long lives.

Merry Christmas, or happy whatever you may celebrate!
 
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An earlier version of this post was published 2015, and in 2017.