When All the Gifts are Wrapped

I’ve never truly felt alone before, but I do now. While I miss my husband, I miss my friend the most. I miss tackling Santa duties with him. I miss laughing with him. I miss talking to him. More than anything else, I miss talking with him. I miss his presence. I miss the warmth of his presence. The space he took up is now empty. He doesn’t fill that space anymore. It’s noticeable. It’s sad. It’s real. The realness of it is what makes me feel alone. The person I loved in an unconditional way—the person I chose to love in an unconditional way—is no longer here.

I chose him. He chose me. ‘Till death do us part. Death did us part. We are warned of that on our wedding day. Everyone is. They tell you that very day death will disrupt you, and you think nothing of it. You assume you’ll be old and gray. You’ll become grandparents together and watch your kids grow, then you will eventually die. But that isn’t what they tell you. They simply say, “until death do you part.” That can happen minutes after you exchange your vows. No one knows.

My son told me he only got six Christmases with his dad. That’s sad. That makes him feel lonely. I can’t change he only got six Christmases with his dad. But I can always remind him of how much his daddy loved him. I can always tell silly stories about his dad and make him laugh in honor of his memory. When I’m able to pull that off, and their sad faces light up and they join in on the story, it’s the best feeling.

We can’t change any of this. We can’t change how he died. We can’t change that he did die. We can’t change our last words to him. We can’t change that when all the gifts are wrapped and set underneath the tree, he isn’t standing beside me. We can’t change that he won’t be helping them with their gifts on Christmas morning. It all happened. Everything that has happened has happened and we can’t change that. And their dad can’t change any of that either.

I was so afraid they would ask Santa for their dad, so we didn’t write letters to Santa this year. I told them that we should let the magic happen and see how it goes. I told them I think we have a lot of love left in our home and it’ll bring some great surprises from Santa. We baked daddy’s favorite cookies. We started a tradition of hanging a special ornament to represent dad on the tree. Notes were stuffed in daddy’s stocking. Santa will still bring his favorite Christmas candy.

We can’t change that someone truly special to us is missing. But we can always choose to remember him with love. We can always choose to honor him in a way that makes sense to us. We can choose to understand that what we do may not make sense to others, and we will know that is okay. We can choose to continue to thrive as a family because we are still here, even if he is not. This isn’t what any of us wanted. Not ever. But this is where we are.

My Christmas wish is that my boys grow up together and stay close and remain best friends. That they continue to confide in me and tell me when they are sad and upset, and always show when they are happy and excited. We’ve always been a family that hugged each other often, but I’ve noticed they hug me randomly much more often now. I’ll be cleaning or cooking, something they normally stay clear of, and now I’ll feel their little arms reach around me and say nothing.

As an adult, I knew either me or my husband would die first and that was reality. As a child, you don’t ever think your parents are going to die, especially when they were perfectly fine the last time you saw them. It shakes their stable ground in a way the three of us never imagined. The four of us, probably. It shakes everything. Breaks my heart.