The Abyss

                 

Sometimes the decor does not describe what we feel inside.

  

               There was a film that Daniel and the other kids used to watch periodically, called the Abyss.  They enjoyed it and we have a copy on DVD somewhere in the house to this day.   However, the abyss to which I am referring, is something a bit different.

                        Each year since Daniel and my father passed, we go into the holidays with hope and positivity. Thanksgiving often has glorious weather in Virginia, often with warm winds, fallen leaves and easy travels.  Of course, Daniel passed suddenly the day after Thanksgiving, at the beginning of the Christmas season.  With the completion of the washing and putting away of the last Thanksgiving platter, our thoughts turn to Christmas, and the weather turns cold, just as it did that one cruel year in which we spent the weekend after Thanksgiving planning a funeral rather than putting up wreaths.  The cold weather which seems to come on precisely that weekend coupled with the fragrances of this time of year has almost a transformative power to take us back to the very moments when Daniel evaporated from Earth.  Thus begins our own annual abyss.   I am not saying that the holidays no longer have joy here, because we find it somehow, to honor him and to honor my father, but during the period of time which stretches from Thanksgiving to Christmas, the abyss is a continually repeating bridge from cataclysmic days and to firmer footing in which we decide that God is indeed in control and that He still intends the rest of us to remain here and live a life as best we can.  It is however, never easy and never carefree, this new normal.  These days become less terrible than the initial ones, but never without the overlay of having suddenly and inexplicably lost Daniel, and my father just before.

                         We are not depressed, however we are ever mindful of the shortness of human days.  Each Christmas we enter the season with fewer friends and relatives than we had before.  This is normal and yet it does not seem so, so many times.

Sometimes the answer to surviving this season emotionally intact is a scaled down Christmas with only what was really important to you, and yours.

                         For many people the Christmas season is an abyss for you too.   Please know that our family is thinking of you and praying for you too.  Please know that although the season can be hard on many of us who know a loss or layered losses at this time, that eventually, we are all reunited and that eventually all will be well.  Until then, enjoy each moment of your life as best you can, and as it benefits those you love. Celebrate in the manner in which was most important to you and to your loved one who isn't with you this holiday season.  Remember that even without them, that Love never ends and that it endures all things, even our separation across the veil.   There is more on the endurance of love in a quite famous and wonderful book, but of course, you know this.