The Season of Goodwill?

Well it feels like time I should post about Christmas but what to say? I think that during December I have been through every possible emotion with regard to the forthcoming festivities and the absence of Dave.

The first challenge was attending a carol service at York Minster in the early part of the month. The service is organised by Tricia and her friends from the York Branch of FSID (Foundation for the study of Sudden Infant Deaths). For those of you who don't know Tricia and Rob's baby Callum died in March 1994 aged 4 months. The service is an annual event in our family calendar and we have attended every year that it has been held since Callum's death, as do a wide range of our close friends. To even contemplate attending without Dave was a tough call and right up until the last minute I did not know whether I would be able get myself across the threshold of the Minster. Fresh in my mind was Dave standing in the pulpit giving a reading two years ago and him being there last year but in tremendous pain. The whole focus of the service being about babies who have tragically died gives it a heightened sense of emotion and for me, this year, remembering Dave, and the babies that we lost in pregnancy, took me over the edge.

The sermon during the service was very poignant. It was given by the Dean of York Minster and it was about bereavement. He used the poem from the funeral in "Four weddings and a funeral" as a starting point. You know the one that begins "He was my north, my south, my east, my west". He said that it was interesting that this poem started using the language of maps as he said in his experience people who are bereaved become disorientated and often feel lost. Their life looks outwardly the same - they live in the same house, do the same jobs, have the same family and friends but their whole world is different. What makes it further disorientating is that people all around them are carrying on with their lives as before as if nothing has happened. He also said that what further disorientates people is they completely lose their sense of self and who they are and as a result of this can become incredibly lonely. I don't know if I am explaining this very well but it made perfect sense at the time and what he said actually was an accurate description of how I have felt for a lot of this year. I ended up getting a lot of comfort from the service and just being with all my close friends and went on to enjoy a good few glasses of wine in a local bar afterwards.

From that day I felt as if I had been thrown headlong in to Christmas! A constant barrage of food adverts on the telly from companies like Sainsburys and M and S showing how the "perfect" Christmas should look (and that definitely is not a mum and daughter sitting by themselves at a table with a turkey the size of a pigeon). Then there were the endless Christmas songs on the radio and in the shops. Mariah Carey "All I want for Christmas is you!" having a particular poignancy in spite of the fact that I absolutely hate Mariah Carey. Added to this I work in a school with seemingly endless rehearsals of Christmas carols - it was a heady mix. And then there was just the endlessly banal, what I call Christmas Crapola conversations about present buying, festive menus, what people have in their freezer and machinations over which family members people will be saddled with this year. Normally these conversations would just make me laugh that people are so immensely boring, but this year they have at times just irritated the hell out of me! I became worried that I might take a machine gun to some unsuspecting carol singer or plant hand grenades in all the turkeys in Sainsburys. I have said or many years that if anything is not right in your life Christmas amplifies this with all the images of how the perfect Christmas should look, when you are in as difficult position as me it is nearly enough to take you over the edge!

These problems with Christmas did lead to a particularly terrible weekend ten days ago when I was already struggling and Emma got terribly upset over the Christmas Tree. Buying the Christmas Tree and decorating it was something that she always did with her dad and after some friends delivered the tree to our house she completely went to pieces and sobbed her heart out. We seemed to go on a downward slide for a couple of days after that and I spent the next afternoon Christmas shopping in York unable to see anything whatsoever in front of me due the constant tears. The arrival of the snow brought more tears from Emma as her dad was an ace snowball thrower (able to hit distant targets i.e. people with amazing accuracy which helped him to achieve a near hero status with her friends) and there are somethings you just can't try to replicate.

I was reading an article in the Guardian at the weekend by a journalist called Simon van Booy whose wife died a couple of years ago leaving him a single parent to their daughter Madeleine. He called the article "Love and Loss at Christmas" and said (rather poetically) about dealing with Christmas "Grief is a room without doors – but somehow, with its tinsel and clichés, Christmas finds a way in. In the absence of a loved one, all the pageantry, all the carols and parties and bright bustling pubs, are an unbearable silence. For many, the season of goodwill and joy is also the season of loneliness and despair, during which nothing grows except the longing for what can never be". And on that dreadful weekend that is where I was with it all. I could relate to his feeling that "At times it feels as though Christmas is laughing in our face like a drunken bully".

But thankfully as with everything these dreadful feelings pass. I finished work on Friday and have now had some time to catch up on that elusive (for me) commodity sleep and have had more time to relax with friends. I now feel much more calm and peaceful and better able to face the challenge of my first Christmas for 27 years without Dave. I am not going to pretend that it will be plain sailing. Even now as I type this the thought of Emma jumping in to bed with her pillowcase full of presents without Dave there for the first time is enough to make me well up with tears, but I am aware that it is something that we both have to face. As usual our friends have come up trumps and are keeping us busy with invitations from Christmas Eve to the 27th and Emma and I intend to have the best possible Christmas we can in the circumstances. I am sure there will be tears from us both and our hearts will ache for Dave but we fully intend to make the best of a difficult situation. If we have got this far I am sure we can make it through another couple of days!

And finally I feel the need to leave a message for Dave on his blog: Darling, Emma and I miss you more than words can say. We still have a big Dave/Dad shaped hole in our lives that no-one else can fill. I miss being wrapped and cossetted in your love, knowing that you had so much love for me made for a life of grace and ease. I am still so unbearably sad that you died but then we always said life wasn't fair. Somehow Emma and I are getting through this time and will continue to stand for a life full of fun,love and laughter (despite their being quite a bit of evidence to the contrary at the present time!), but we will get there in order to honour your memory. You would be very proud of the amazing young woman that Emma has become. Love you always, Sarahx

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Its loveliness increases: it will never
Pass into nothingness"