Thanksgiving just passed and the day was pretty good, all things considered. We started off the morning by going to the cememtery to spend a couple minutes reflecting at Kaleb's grave, there were some tears shed but it was to be expected. We then made the three hour drive south of here to spend the day with my brother and his new wife, mom and Dave and I. This was our first holiday without my dad too, so as I said we all knew the day would be tough but we made it through. We had a nice dinner and some laughs as we talked about past holidays with Dad. When the evening was over we drover over to my brother-in-laws house to spend the night (he lives closer to my brother than to us). It was as we got in the car to head over there that everything really hit me and I didn't think I would ever stop crying. I realized that the last time we were at their house Kaleb was with us and that brought me down hard, he had never been to my brothers, even though his presence was missed he had never physically been to his house so I guess somehow that made things a little easier but that wave crashed down on me pretty hard and it took me awhile to get back up.
Now you can't go anywhere without seeing everything Christmas. I just wish I could go to sleep and stay asleep until after the New Year. We recently attended a Grief Share seminar called "surviving the holidays". We broke down into small groups and shared our stories and what I find most difficult about this type of sharing is making people understand that we have been grieving for two and a half years, it's just more intense now because he is physically gone. People think that you have a "normal" child who just gets sick and passes on. We have to explain that we thought we had a normal child for about 7/8 months and then were forced to watch him decline little by little until he could no longer do anything. That he was never able to crawl or walk or talk, to lose a loved one is hard enough but to lose one in such a cruel way, in my opinion, makes it worse. He was never able to say I don't feel good or my stomach hurts or no I don't want anymore food, he couldn't tell me that he was having a hard time breathing or tell me if something hurt....so sharing our grief takes time to explain in a manner that people might understand how we are feeling. To understand that after his first Christmas, (we were still in the dark at his second Christmas but we knew something was wrong) the holidays have never been a happy or easy time for us but will be even more painful this year and the years to come.
If we could, we would avoid Christmas all together, but that is definately not possible.
Bears have the right idea....hibernation!!!