Wading Back Into Christmas

How do you manage when Christmas doesn’t feel so merry? This is the third holiday season for our family since losing Rivena, and it’s a question we are still trying to answer.

Losing a loved one is hard, period. Losing a child is soul-crushing. And it’s no secret that the holiday season can stir up all kinds of thoughts and memories that make it even harder. The sad truth is that our family doesn’t come close to having a corner on the market for grieving through the holidays, especially in a year like 2020 when as of this writing 286,000 American families are facing their first holiday season since losing a loved one to COVID-19.

Reactions to loss are all over the map. We all react differently. We all grieve in our own ways. One of the few things I can say with certainty, however, is that feeling a sense of loss is part of being alive. It’s a fundamental part of our human condition. As I’ve written before, to love someone deeply is to grieve them deeply when they are gone. We can’t have one without the other.

Which is why holidays and anniversary dates in general tend to be hard for those of us left behind by someone we love. They are the stark reminders of the love we still hold and the emptiness we can’t fill.

What follows is my own way of working through the heaviness of the season. Writing is my therapy. I invite you to come along, and for those who, like me, have lost somebody close perhaps there will be something here that helps you find your own way through the holiday blues.

Setting the Stage

The last time I saw my first-born child alive was December 27, 2017. For a brief period that holiday season, we had achieved what most empty nesters hope for… we managed to get both our adult children home to Colorado for Christmas. And while the time went way too fast, it was so nice to get to enjoy a few days together before they each went back their own separate ways. In Rivena’s case, I’ll never forget that last hug she gave me in the airport that day. The look in her eyes was as if she knew it may be the last time. It was tender, it was scared, it was devoid of hope, and it was chilling. In hindsight, I so wish we had kept her with us that day, but as I’ve learned in the years since, replaying what-ifs can’t bring her back. Instead, we respected her wishes and let her fly back to Utah to continue her treatment for depression.

What Christmas represented for us

Every family has their own holiday traditions that develop from year to year, and we were no exception. With our youngest daughter Madison’s birthday falling shortly before Christmas, we always started the season with a birthday carriage ride through downtown Denver to look at the city lights. In most years, there was a family shopping day at a local mall (that was so much more about the time together than any real shopping) followed by dinner and a movie. There was usually a live show of some variety – regular annual productions of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, and The Grinch all made the rotation. Putting up the Christmas tree, unboxing and adding what ended up being dozens of individually meaningful ornaments, making “reindeer food” when the kids were little, advent ribbons adorned with daily candy, opening a single gift on Christmas Eve (always a new ornament for the tree and fresh pajamas) followed by either Christmas Vacation or Elf on the big screen, hot cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning… all of these things came to represent how we did Christmas.

While I would be the first to admit we haven’t ever been all that focused on the literal religious meaning of Christmas, it has always represented sacred family time to us. Starting that very first year we had Rivena as a newborn, we made a conscious decision to be at our own home on Christmas morning. In all the years since, we have never, not once (until recently – more to follow) missed a Christmas morning in our own home gathered around our own tree.

If that sounds very Norman Rockwell-esque, well, it’s because it was. With or without all the ‘stuff,’ I can think back to being a young, struggling family in a tiny and cramped rented duplex complete with a bent wire hanger serving as a TV antenna and I still remember those Christmas mornings as magical. Because they were… Kim has always been gifted in her ability to make our home feel like you just stepped into a painting. Somehow, she’s always managed to get that mix of festive and authentic just right. And it’s just felt good.

Perhaps more important than any of it, though, was the time. The simple act of getting to spend time together was what I found so valuable through the years. For almost all my professional career, I traveled for a living. I logged more than 100,000 flight miles per year for nearly two decades straight and spent enough nights in hotels to have ‘earned’ top-tier lifetime status. But getting to be home over the holidays? That was priceless.

Because I managed large client relationships (a fancy way of saying I sold stuff), I always managed to have at least one but usually two weeks completely off around Christmas. No matter how good a client relationship may be, nobody wants to see their salesperson over the holidays.

Combine that with the fact the kids always had two weeks off from school, and that left the door open for our family to have truly special time together. The older the kids got, the more important that time became. Kim and I both still smile when we think about the year we bought a PlayStation game called Rock Band for the family. With one kid in high school and one in middle school, the last thing we expected was to get to be with them for any amount of time. And yet, the four of us spent the entire week from Christmas to New Year’s doing the same thing each day… we all slept in late, headed to the basement, and proceeded to spend hours and hours playing Rock Band as a family. It was stupid, silly, and so much fun. Because of that week, Rivena’s Mick Jagger impersonation will forever remain legendary in my mind.

Add up years of individual experiences like that to equal more than a quarter century of practice doing all the Christmas-y things as a family. More than a quarter century of memories. More than a quarter century of annual ornaments for the tree, each with their own special meaning. Layer on the knowledge that our last actual “happy” day together – ever – as a family of four was on Christmas Day in 2017, as Rivena fell into a deep depression the next day. Put it all together, and it’s no surprise that like so many who have lost loved ones, we now find it unbearable to think about Christmas the same way.

The Years Since

As I mentioned at the outset, this is the third Christmas season since Rivena died. This is also the first time in those three years we have decided to embrace the season and decorate. It’s the first time we’ve put up a tree. And it has very naturally stirred up so many emotions in the process.

That first Christmas after losing Rivena, Kim and I agreed we simply could not do it. As in, not at all. We couldn’t even think about Christmas. As those of you who know us are aware, we literally ran away from the holidays that year. We found a decent deal on a month-long condo rental sitting directly on one of our favorite beaches in the Caribbean, and we completely left Christmas and all the normal trappings behind. No tree. No gifts. No flood of memories with every turn of the head. We ignored Christmas completely and it was exactly what we needed.

While Christmas is certainly celebrated in the islands, it’s not as in-your-face as things tend to be here in Colorado. We didn’t hear Christmas songs in every store, garland was not strung on every light post, there were no lots full of freshly cut trees ready to take home, no mall santas, no seeing your breath in the cold air, and most definitely no chance of a white Christmas. We went from the honking sounds of the geese bobbing in the frozen lake behind our house to the rhythmic gentle whoosh of waves caressing the sand. It was the exact opposite of everything the previous 25 years of Christmases had been. Did we effectively bury our heads in the sand that year? You bet your ass we did. And it got us through.

Last year, the second year post loss, we stayed closer to home. But we upended our lives in a whole different way. Earlier in the year, we decided to sell the house that had been our home since the kids were little. Not only was it way too much house for two of us, but we also realized that memories – mostly good, some less so, but all hard – lurked in every corner of the house. Without going into detail here (perhaps a topic for another day), we managed to move into a new, more appropriately sized home just a few miles from where we had been for the previous 20 years. The timing was such that we moved into the new house the first week of December.

Where we had run away the year before, we decided to stay in Colorado for Christmas itself and limp through the holiday season after the move. The only real Christmas feel came with a quick weekend trip to see our nieces dance as Clara and the Rose Queen in the Missoula, Montana production of The Nutcracker. Otherwise, we had so much going on simply trying to find spaces for our boxed-up lives in a new house roughly half the size of the old one, not to mention being deep in numerous renovation projects (again, a topic for another day) that we didn’t bother doing much in the way of decorating for Christmas. Kim managed to pull out a few small festive bits and bobs, but there was no tree, there were no lights, and we managed though a very scaled back and subdued Christmas morning. It felt more like a day we were trying to just get through than one with any real meaning.

A Step Forward

Fast forward to the present; it’s what prompted me to write this in the first place. For the first time since losing Rivena, we are trying to reconnect with the Christmas season. We decided to open up the green and red storage boxes that had largely remained untouched for three years. We decided to put lights on the new house. We decided to put up the tree. And it’s been hard. Really hard.

In so many ways, it’s as if we are busying ourselves with things to do simply to not think about who won’t be here to experience the season with us. The actual process is hard to describe. It’s almost like there are two simultaneous truths, side by side. One feels good for the soul to be embracing a time of year that has always been special to our family. And one is enough to stop you cold with the memories that come flooding back. Both are true.

The best example I can give involves a box containing some decorations that had always been put up in our old kitchen. As Kim began unpacking the contents, she pulled out a little snowman chalkboard that had been used to mark some of the fun dates each year. Sure enough, the important dates from our 2017 Christmas were still printed on the board, a lingering time stamp from the last time this was hung on our old pantry door. Seeing the line, “Dec 22 Rivena Home” with a heart next to it was crushing. I’m tearing up even now, almost 2 weeks later, at the thought of that one. The last time that stupid snowman was up, there was hope. There was optimism. Both those qualities can be admittedly hard to find today.

Despite that push and pull, that yin and yang, we have chosen to keep moving forward. Kim has created a feeling in our new home that is back to being warm, welcoming, and just the right amount of festive. We’ve chosen to be careful with just how much we’re willing to wade into this year, but we’ve at least gotten back into the water. I even broke my own cardinal rule about no Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving… I put lights on the house the week before, and the tree was up before the calendar rolled to December.

There have been definite limits, however. While our Christmas tree is up and lit, all the kids’ ornaments remain in boxes. Like seeing the chalkboard, which is also now back in a box, Rivena’s ornaments bring up too much raw emotion. We’re simply not ready to sort through the 25 years’ worth of meaningful experiences, inside jokes, and coming of age references that those ornaments represent. For Madison, hers are there for her, but only when she is ready for them.

The irony is not lost on me that the COVID-defined year 2020 is the time we’ve chosen to embrace Christmas again. I was reminded by a text from my Mom recently that the decorating most of us do this year won’t get to be experienced by others. Casual gatherings with friends and big family celebrations will likely not happen in the same way they have in years past. So, the decorating we do (or don’t do) is for us. It’s about creating a space that makes us feel good. It’s about keeping our own holiday traditions alive despite who else may or may not get to experience them with us. And as I’ve learned, it doesn’t matter how many years may have passed since we were in a state of mind where we could do this.

Parting Thoughts

In a year that has seen more loss than we collectively are accustomed to, our family is certainly not the only one to be struggling with the loss of a loved one through this holiday season. If you find yourself, like me, recognizing that you’ve loved someone deeply enough to sometimes buckle under the weight of grief, know that you are in good company. Take this holiday season as it comes. Do what you feel you can do. Do what gives you a sense of peace… I really wanted to say joy, but to be fair, I’ve found I have to settle for peace while actual joy remains elusive.

We don’t have any of this figured out, but those steps forward are something. For us, it’s how we continue to keep Rivena’s memory alive while acknowledging the hard truth that she is not. It’s one more step forward, this time with ribbons, boxes, and bows. And a heart that feels a few sizes bigger. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from our family to yours.