Four Christmases (interrupted by a funeral)

Christmas, 2014. We didn’t know it then, but it was to be our last real, normal Christmas together. Mass, dinner, presents – it was a beautiful day, and Nick got that silly pointer he loved so much. It wasn’t our last good day; we still had a few more really good months before he started to fail. But it was the last Christmas that we were us.

Christmas, 2015, we were so excited. Nick was home from the hospital! I was so sure that he would recover his strength. I thought he was too. I didn’t realize that he had lost his will to live. It was just a few days later that he began to say “no more doctors, no more hospitals; and it was less than a month later that he opted for hospice care. I was so happy that day; I didn’t know my heart would break six weeks later.

Christmas, 2016. I expected that first Christmas without Nick to be hard. But life does not always follow our plans. A few days before Christmas, my best friend’s husband had unexpected surgery – and not just minor surgery, but open heart surgery. He came through fine, and was home for Christmas, but all my attention was on my best friend and her family. I spent Christmas day with them, cooking a heart-healthy Christmas dinner, as we all recovered from those recent sleepless nights. It was, in a way, a miracle: the heart problem that a new doctor was concerned about, an unexpected opening with the chief of heart surgery at the local hospital, and then a quickly scheduled surgery before that chief surgeon left on an extended trip out of the country. Those days were probably the first days where my first thought of the day was not Nick, and my last act of the day was not tears for myself. Love casts out fear: my love for my best friend and her family kept my own pain and fear at bay, and the Christmas holiday was one of joy for how well the surgery went, and the happy knowledge that a complete recovery would rapidly happen.

Christmas, 2017 was a much different Christmas than I ever had before. The crackling fire was a video on television, just like the gently falling snow later in the night. Christmas Eve, as we open presents, we had the patio doors open wide to let it the cool night air. Christmas in South Florida, family all around, lots of love and joy, and my heart heavy with emptiness. I suppose there comes a time when the pain stops coming in hard punches to my heart; a time when I don’t suddenly start to cry. I am not sure if look forward to that day, or if I am afraid for it to come.