Grief & “The Holidays”: The Gift that Keeps Giving
It would be a lie to say that I was looking forward to the 2024 Fall/Winter Holiday Season. In fact, you could even say I have been dreading this. You’d be right. Big buckets of dread. Great. Just what everyone likes during a time of nearly-forced joy, cheer, festivities…someone who is bereft and full of dread.
Ok, let’s peel this onion back a little bit. This fall I’ve been quietly working on my health, ever since closing my business at the end of September. Imperative was to address the caregiver PTSD that was being triggered. Inside of that trauma response lives a lot of grief. I lost all sense of safety and security while caregiving for my mom, her dementia stealing ourselves from both of us. Gently peeling that layer back revealed some hard truths about generational trauma, mainly in the form of abuse, received my entire life from my parents. The moment I mentally labeled these memories and actions “child abuse”, I had to pull over to the side of the road and sob. And text my therapist. Could it be that all of these stories I used to tell to make a joke were not only horribly not-funny but also examples of abuse? Turns out they were. They are. Wow.
Looking at the calendar, one year ago my family had a real shitty Thanksgiving week. Hospice called: my mom was “actively transitioning” and death would be soon. My brother and his family somehow magicked plane tickets to get here the next day. We held her hand, told stories, sprinkled her blankets with patchouli, and listened to her death rattle, cringing when the time between breaths seemed longer than the last. She died the next day, surrounded by her kids, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. My brother and his family flew home the next day; that was the day before Thanksgiving. You know what I did that Thanksgiving? Broke the fuck down. You know what I did the day after Thanksgiving? Got back to caregiving: scheduling her cremation and emptying her room at the facility. You know what I did the next day, the Saturday after Thanksgiving? That day was her 70th birthday. She missed it by 4 days. I celebrated/mourned it alone.
Two years ago, my mom’s disease took an ugly turn and in November of 2022, she got violent and was sent to the ER because she assaulted a care team member at the memory care facility. She had only been living there for two months and they essentially kicked her out. We spent 99 days at the hospital, the medical team working hard to “stabilize” her while I frantically tried to find a memory care facility that would and could accept her as a resident. “Stabilizing” means trying to find anti-psychotics that keep her non-violent while still being awake. For many of those days she was strapped to her hospital bed, preventing her from hitting and kicking us, and had eyes on her nearly 24/7. I celebrated that Thanksgiving in her hospital room, before being screamed at and then guiltily sneaking off to my friend’s house. By the time she was medically stabilized and able to move into a new memory care facility, she no longer knew who I was nor responded to my presence. I mourned alone, the ambiguous grief of truly losing my mom before her death.
Coming to today, there is nothing quite like time, society, and every single retailer on the planet forcibly shoving me into the family holiday season while I’m navigating and trying to reconcile holiday season grief, this new perspective on my parents, and this tightly-wound onion of trauma that I’m left holding. I have amazing friends who invite me to their holiday celebrations. I love the invitations. I love being included. I love them. However, I don’t feel like celebrating. I’m not even sure who I am or what I enjoy any more, and I sure as hell don’t want to be some 5th-wheel at another family’s celebration of togetherness, especially when all I can see is the harsh truths of what I lost. My mom. My safety. My trust. Nearly a decade of my life.
Feels like everyone is fixated on bringing more and more into their lives, and I’m just over here holding ashes.