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. ©

Sunday Morning: Third Christmas Without my Husband

Days before my first Christmas without Don I wrote a post titled Where Have you Gone, Christmas? and it started like this: “In a year of firsts for widows, probably the hardest first is not the same one across the board. Some might say their wedding anniversary; others might say the birthday that can no longer add a number to an age, still others would name Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Eve. For all widows the holiday season, as a whole, is full of painful reminders of long standing family traditions that can never be the same again. Each holiday song heard in a store, each light on a neighbor’s house, each card in the mail screams, 'He’s gone, he’s gone!' Happiness is all around us and even the friendliest festivities only magnifies our loneliness. We are alone even in a crowd. But in the wake of what happened recently in Newtown, Connecticut, my loneliness at Christmas time pales and it almost makes me ashamed to even be writing about it. But I write when I have things on my mind. I can’t help myself.”

So here I am, two years later knowing that I’d be less dramatic should I be asked to describe widowhood grief at this point in my journey. Christmas cards don’t screaming at me anymore. The neighbor’s holiday lights don’t annoying me. I can sing along with Christmas carols coming from the car radio. And even though I got blindsided with tears at the senior hall Spirit celebration, it’s been a pretty good holiday season so far. But---and this is a BIG but---the Newtown parents of the shooting victims at Sandy Hook Elementary are weighing heavy on my mind once again. Why? I keep wondering how much of a setback in their healing process they’re enduring because of the school shootings in Pakistan last week where 132 kids and ten teachers died in a horrific massacre. 

And in despair I bowed my head:

“There is no peace on earth,” I said,

“For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Everything is relative, isn’t it, when talking about the human condition. We all differ in our feelings, with no universal truth or validity to back them up. My mom was good at drilling that concept into me at an early age. “You think you have it bad,” she might have said if I complained about doing a chore, “kids on the other side of world carry water for their families from wells a mile away.” “Eat your carrots! Children in China are starving to death.” As an adult I can say to myself: You think your widow’s grief is bad, try being a parent of a child killed in a mass shooting. Everything IS relative when we allow ourselves to see own circumstances compared to those less fortunate than we are. There are always people who are lower down on the chain of human suffering and I am grateful I am able to see that. Thanks, Mom. Thanks Oprah. Gratitude. Jeez, do all roads lead back to those two? That’s a joke only fans of Motherhood Guilt and Oprah will likely get. 

I ended the 2012 post quoted above like this: “And how will I survive my first Christmas alone in the shadow of what happened in Newtown? I will watch Miracle on 34th Street, bake myself some bacon wrapped chicken and be profoundly grateful I got 42 years with my husband. I will also shed a few tears for the parents in Connecticut and everywhere else on earth who will never get to see their precious children grow up.” This year all I’d have to do is change the words ‘bacon wrapped chicken’ to ‘turkey legs’ and I could almost write the same ending word for word for this post. Christmas isn’t for mourning Don (or anyone else like my dad who died on Christmas day). Christmas, for me, is about appreciating how truly lucky I was to have had Don and Dad in my life for so long. I can’t be sad about that. I can’t moan and groan about how snow will likely keep me from going to my family’s Christmas Eve party. Well, I could but it would be a terrible waste of time and energy that could be put to better use. A better use like rekindling the belief that goodness will one day triumph over evil, then we will truly have peace on earth, good will towards men. Amen. Can you tell it’s Sunday morning here at the Church of Jean? ©

 

NOTE: Most people will recognize the stanza above as part of a Christmas carol named I Hear the Bells on Christmas Morning but how many know the song was originally a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Written during the American Civil War, he was inspired to write the poem after his son, who had joined the Union army without his blessing, was wounded in battle and Longfellow’s wife had just died in a fire. One might rightly say that grief created a carol that people have enjoyed in varying forms since 1872 when it was first set to music. If you know the carol you'll know that even in his grief, Longfellow found hope for the future which is why the carol has endured.

An old friend shared this with me. It's truly beautiful.