Christmas Spirit, Anyone?

My first Christmas alone after Don died came on the heels of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that took the lives of twenty children and six adults. It put my grief in perspective. After all, I had forty-two years with Don and the parents in Connecticut only got a few with their innocent little angels. Their incomprehensible and deep grief was a stark reminder that there are always people in the world who are hurting more than we do. And now we have another Christmas time tragedy, this time taking the lives of fourteen people and injuring an additional twenty-four. Such senseless acts of violence get harder and harder to ignore in my blog world where we’re supposed to share the ups and the downs of our lives but often I don’t when it comes to how the news and politics affects me. I’m a news junkie. It’s a big part of my life, but writing about that aspect of my life doesn't fit what people expect when they land on a widow's blog. After Sandy Hook, however, I couldn’t ignore that incident and I wrote an entry titled Where Have You Gone, Christmas? And as you can see by the similar title of this blog, I'm asking a similar question again this year. Did the shooters in San Bernardino rob everyone of their Christmas spirit? ISIS would love that if it were true. Or are most people able to push it aside and go on with their lives as if nothing happened?

I went to a Christmas party on Thursday at the union hall where 350 attended---retirees and their spouses. It’s the first one I’ve been to since the Christmas before Don died. He loved those parties and I always had a good time. I did this week, too, but several times I found myself on the verge of tears, totally catching me off guard. I hadn’t been in a “weepy widow” mode in eons but early on at the party when a coworker of Don’s smiled brightly at me and came over to ask how I was doing, I felt the tears well up behind my eyes before he even got to where I was sitting. Don’t do it Jean! I told myself. You cannot cry here! Twice more before the afternoon was over I had to remind myself to keep my emotions in check. Once was when I had a flashing image of gunmen coming through the door. What would I do if it happened here? And the other time I felt tears welling up was when a friend of Don’s and I first greeted each other. He had lost his legs in a horrible accident, then his wife left him shortly after and he had a few really rough years. Now he runs a successful non-profit that gets wheelchair bound people out into the woods during hunting season and Don took part in the program for several years. Some of my best, post-stroke memories came from our involvement with his group---fund raisers, deer camp run by spouses, etc. When I got home from the party, I was exhausted. Not physically but emotionally and I took a two hour nap which I rarely do during the day.

Long time readers here know I hang around a very big and busy website that encourages political debate on issues of the day. The thread about the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, to date, has nearly 30,000 views and 2,500 replies. With the exception of a dozen or so replies I’ve mostly lurked on that thread. It’s just too knee-jerk reactionary for my tastes but I’m like a butterfly to a flame. I can’t quit reading the new replies. It’s truly alarming the way some people believe in matching one violent act with more violent acts and on individuals who had nothing whatsoever to do with the shooters. Promoting genocide comes way too easy to internet warriors, as easy as Major General Sherman allegedly saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Have we learned nothing about the cycle of violence and holocausts throughout history? It never ends well. “Violence begets violence,” Martin Luther King Jr. is famous for preaching, a concept based on the Gospel of Mathew 26:52. “’Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.’” Who would have thought I’d wake up today quoting King or the Bible. Certainly not me. 

The bad moments at the party were just that---fleeting moments mixed in with lots of good feelings of being surrounded by people who have warm memories of my husband. Near the end of the Christmas party they did a hundred drawings for cash prizes and the poinsettias on the tables---fifty twenty dollar bills and fifty plants. When I made a comment that I didn’t want to win the cash, I was hoping for a plant, my legless friend at the end of the table said, “If I win one, you can have mine” and before I knew it, nearly everyone at the table was saying the same, joking that I had six changes to win. I went home with a plant and when Jerry’s name was called everyone at our table cheered. Taking care of the widow, so to speak. As I drove home, I didn’t have to wonder where Christmas went. The spirit of the season was memorialized in that plant sitting on the seat next to me. It serves to remind me that people can go through horrendous things like losing your legs or losing a spouse or losing your sense of security out in public after a terrorist attack but in the end, love always shows up to bind our wounds and start the healing process. ©