Ready for Christmas?

It's a question I hear every year. And I am not sure my answer is satisfactory, at least to me. But I say it anyway.

"Are you ready for Christmas?" .... I think people mean, "Have you gotten your Christmas shopping / baking / decorating done?" To that intention, I usually answer, "Almost," and I would be telling the truth.

Summer 2011 - all of the family

But part of me is never ready for Christmas. The part of me that remembers that it was Arielle's favourite holiday, the part that remembers how she'd fill her mouth to the bursting point with Christmas dinner and then try to talk (as a joke), the part that misses her and her quirks. That part of me is never ready.

All the preparation I do for the holiday seems bittersweet. It's not as bitter as it was when the loss was fresh, I'll admit that. But there is a certain wistfulness about it for me. I wish she could enjoy it with us, or that I could be aware of her enjoyment. For all I know, she IS with us every Christmas dinner - it happened once that I was aware of it - that first Christmas. That was SO special. I hug that memory to my heart often.

But people don't need me to bleed on them when they ask something that for them, is more like a "hello, how are ya?" kind of thing. So I say, "Almost," to their query about my 'readiness' for Christmas, and they can go on their merry way. Only those who know me best understand what my response means. I guess that means I have grown as a person ... the "old Judy" would have made them feel uncomfortable by being brutally honest and ruining an otherwise great day for them. I'm not like that anymore. People have a right to feel happy (or whatever they feel) even if I can't quite attain that level of joy myself. And here I go comparing happiness and joy - two totally different experiences. Happiness is usually (for me) dependent on circumstances, and joy speaks more of an inner peace in spite of circumstances.

And yes, I have joy. I can honestly say that as deep as the loss of losing Arielle is, it would have been a deeper loss never to have known her, never to have borne her. There was a time I couldn't get there because the loss hurt so much, but now - I think - I can honestly say that our lives are richer for having had her in them, even if her presence is only a memory now. And I do have the sure hope that one day, I will see her again - without the faults that made life with her less than perfect, that made us - and her - so frustrated. I look forward to building an eternity of experiences with that girl: the one we couldn't (and can't) help but love. Do I miss her? OH yes. Every day! And grief's shape has changed over the years to make space for me / us to honour her memory in little ways that would only matter to us.

So am I ready for Christmas?

Ummm, almost.  :)

Mother's Day - a journey

I have had a love-hate relationship with Mother's Day for almost all of my adult life. From the moment I realized that my own mother was - shall we say - not the best mom in the world, and vowed never to be like her, Mother's Day has been fraught with feelings of anger, shame, jealousy of those who had "the best moms in the world", and confusion about how I should feel about the day - and the role. And her.

When my mom was diagnosed with dementia in 2016, and gradually forgot what she had "done to me" - the confusion grew, the existing emotions were an exercise in frustration, and there were more feelings: hatred for the disease that was making her more and more helpless, guilt that I couldn't forget my childhood like she did, and much, much more. All the while, the 2nd Sunday in May was a day I would always dread. I would even make one post early that day and then leave Facebook alone as I didn't want to read all the gushing messages and posts from people whose mothers seemed so much more saintly to them.  I railed against the idea that the "saint" was what others saw, while I got to see what she was like behind closed doors.  I could see both sides in her, but nobody would believe my version of the woman. Nobody, that is, except my older brother, who saw things up close and personal.

I knew all along that she would never change - that she never once thought she did anything wrong. I knew that she would always treat me like I was six years old. What I didn't realize until a few years later was that her own emotional development - through her own trauma of being the victim of child abuse - was stunted. I was raised by a grown woman with the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old. That stark realization, which I came to in therapy in 2019, freed me to see her for the woman she had become in her dementia. All the masks were stripped away and she showed who she really was to everyone, not just to me. She could be so kind, and in the next breath, critical and cruel. But it was still hard to watch. It was harder to listen to people excuse her behaviour by saying, "It's the dementia." 

When my older brother died in February 2020, I lost someone very important and dear to me, whom I still miss terribly. I also lost my only witness, which was just as hard for me. However, I came to understand that it didn't matter what used to be, just what "is". She could no longer recognize me when I went to tell her about Bro. To her, her daughter Judy was six years old, not some sixty-ish woman. And her short-term memory only lasted for about 5 minutes on a good day. By the end of the visit, she asked me how Bro was doing. I couldn't bear to see her grieve all over again, so I said, "Better than ever, Mom. Better than ever." 

And then came the day that she passed away. April 2, 2023, around 8:40 pm, the phone rang, and a nurse told me that my mother had died.

I didn't know how to feel. At first, I thought it was some cruel April Fool's Day joke so I checked my watch. No, it wasn't that. In a fog, I thanked the woman for telling me, and then started going through the motions of the only surviving natural child of someone who has died. Funeral arrangements, phone calls to inform extended family, travel plans, and write-ups occupied my mind - as did the inevitability of preparing to greet the people who would come to the visiting hours and to the funeral. I don't know how I would have gotten through all the preparation without the help of the funeral director, Erin. She was a God-send.

The overwhelming sensation I felt (and still feel) was relief. She was out of her emotional pain, with a perfect memory, re-united with my dad who had died in 1993, and with both of my brothers (the oldest died in 2010 and Bro in 2020). She also knew everything that I was feeling and had felt. For the first time, she understood me. I can't describe how that felt. It gave me ... rest, I guess. Peace.

The funeral was amazing - but surreal. I decided to let people believe about her what they wished, without making her special memorial about me. I wrote up a biography speech for the pastor to read at the funeral... a list of her accomplishments, things that folks there would remember her doing. I learned that so many people loved her - and that I loved her, in spite of everything.

Mom and Dad on my wedding day in 1981.
He was nibbling her ear.

Mother's Day last year felt like a blur. I was still processing some pretty heavy emotions and realizing some new and interesting things about myself. Now, I imagine Mom being the person she always could have been, totally healed from her own childhood trauma, and able to love and be loved without shame, without false modesty, and without fear. It comforts me. It lets me love the good about who she was, to honour the sacrifices she made, to remember the good times.

As Mother's Day approached this year, I also realized something else. I wasn't dreading it. Strange how that is. Instead, I had come to understand that all these years, I was robbing others of the joy of wishing me a happy Mother's Day and keeping them from celebrating ME as a mom. Wow. 

I've been freed. I can't explain much more than that.

Dearest Judy

 One of the hardest things about life is when the opposite happens, and we are forced (ready or not) to say goodbye. I am no stranger to separation by death. Yet every time it happens to a beloved family member or a close friend, it feels just as awful, just as violent - whether the person died in their sleep or in a tragic accident, or whether there was time to prepare or not. 

One of those incidents happened not long ago. A dear friend, unbeknownst to me, had a stroke and dropped out of view. When Judy was not on social media for 3 weeks, I began to get concerned and I contacted her family, who told me about the stroke. She was in the hospital. 

Judy had always been so strong, so independent, that we did not think much of the fact that she was getting old and it was getting harder for her to move around. We enjoyed her company, her laugh, her stories, her enjoyment of the little things, and most of all her love. When she would call me, she would identify herself as "Judy too," as my name is Judy. We would invite her to our house for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. She and I would make "play dates" or as I called them, "aerie times", referencing our favourite metaphor, the eagle. She would invite our family to Dairy Queen and pay for our meals. She prayed every single day for each of us, as well as for her family and other friends. What a precious lady.

My husband and I went to see her on Christmas day 2023 when she was in the stroke unit; she was largely unresponsive, and her words slurred when she spoke, as if she was drunk. About a week later, we went in to see her again. This time she had been moved to a full-care unit where people go to recover. We were hopeful that she would get better. However, it struck me while we were there that they had put in a feeding tube through her abdominal wall into her stomach. She was totally dependent on them. I remember being grateful that the stroke seemed to affect her ability to compare the quality of her current life with the one she had been living prior to the stroke. We wanted to make our visits a regular thing.

The week after that, we got sick with some sort of flu and we didn't go to see her for fear that she would catch our sickness, which would not have been good. We were sick for about three weeks. 

During the time we were sick, Judy passed away. We didn't know. One day in early February, I went onto her wall on Facebook, and learned from a post someone left that she had passed, just about a month or so prior to her 80th birthday. 

I'd been keeping a Christmas card for her in my purse, which i wrote to her after our second visit. Yesterday I was looking for something else ... and I found it. Slowly, I un-tucked the back flap of the envelope, and slid the card out. The picture was of a cardinal. Inside I had written a short note to her from us, and I started it out with "Dearest Judy," as I often did on Christmas or her birthday. 

I froze. Floods of memories from before the stroke came to me, as if to comfort me. 

Try as I might, I could not (and cannot) be sad for her. In 2007, she lost her beloved husband Bob to a heart attack, and she often spoke of him with us, because we knew him from when they were married. We knew that they were reunited after all this time (this coming April 3rd it would have been 17 years). She is happy and pain-free for the first time in many years - head injuries from a previous relationship gave her Menière's Disease, affecting her hearing and her balance. She is finally free of it. 

No, I cannot be sad for her. However, I can be sad for me. I will miss this wonderful big sister of mine, who was technically old enough to be my mother. I will miss our long talks, our prayer sessions, our sing-songs, her vivid imagination, and so much more. I will miss how articulate and talented in writing she was, how spiritual and yet down-to-earth she was. 

And I can imagine her keeping watch over us all, in that "great cloud of witnesses" the Scriptures mention (Hebrews 11, I believe, but I could be wrong.) I can picture her joining our daughter Arielle's twerking class (Mother Theresa was her first graduate, haha)... and dancing with all her might. I can imagine her singing while Bob makes his heavenly electric guitar just wail ... and I know that while it seems like a long time here, it won't be long for her when she turns around and I'll be standing there, arms wide for a big hug.