Category: Holidays

Resolutionary Road

January 1, 2022

It’s been a long time since I picked up my digital pen to write a post for this grief blog.  It certainly isn’t because life is now all kittens and yarn (for any of us!) but mostly because I had lost my thread. Of yarn? More like some prickly, slightly abrasive twine!  Now retired, I feel compelled to pick it up again to share thoughts on this complicated and sometimes puzzling journey.

As we kick 2021 out the door and try desperately to bar the windows, many of us look at this freshly minted New Year as another opportunity, another chance to do (or feel) better.  I am also cautiously hopeful.

And although the rough barbs of grief have blessedly dulled over the past five years, the nubs still catch occasionally on my pantlegs.  

Moving to Virginia more than two years ago was my way of trying to jumpstart a fresh life.  It has helped in many ways.  I am not surrounded by the tangible memories that my husband and I had built together, and now live closer to my siblings.  But I’m self-aware enough to know you can’t shut out feelings like some sort of religious zealot knocking on the door with handfuls of gospel tracts.

A very wise and helpful friend of mine once shared a mantra she espouses to help get through her days, and I have tried my best to adopt it.

“Before you go to bed, think of three things that happened during the day that you are grateful for.  They do not have to be big things.  Then, when you wake up, say to God or to the universe, “Help me, help me, help me.”

So, I attempt to do this when I am mindful.  Last night as I headed to bed well before the finale of New Year’s Eve, I lay in bed and thought, “I have a nice home.  I took a walk today with family and friends in the sunshine.  My thumbs (in the early stages of arthritis) are not bothering me.”

I woke quite early today to rain pelting the window nearest my bed.  I had left it cracked open since it’s been so unseasonably warm in Virginia this December.  I listened to the water hitting the panes for a long time and soon joined along with my own slow-moving waterworks, keenly missing my husband’s warm presence still.  But then I wiped the tears away and mentally hoisted up my big girl pants to complete the other half of the mantra. Given the day, they could also be construed as resolutions, but what is there to lose?

 “Help me to be a better person.  Help me to embrace life, instead of approaching it as something to be endured.  Help me get through this new year feeling more grateful for what I have instead of dwelling on what I have lost.”

This post may cause a sleigh-full of side effects

It’s a fact of life that Death haunts us most around the holidays.

The loss of loved ones swirl around our everyday thoughts, landing indiscriminately at odd, inopportune times. There are few people in my circle of friends and family who do not struggle to some degree with the holidays, to push past grief  phantoms wearing chains that even Marley’s ghost would envy.

While watching TV recently, I found myself feeling jealous of a couple in one of those pharmaceutical commercials. You know the type I mean – happy, good looking people in some exotic vacation location who had struggled and overcome some chronic condition like scaly skin. Jesus – what’s wrong with me? I know this misplaced envy is not just about the actors skipping hand in hand across my television screen. It galls me that they can take a pill to improve their unhappy condition.

After my husband died a few years ago, I went on a mild antidepressant. I think they are helpful for many people. For me, though, they led to incredibly vivid dreams so realistic and involved I was left exhausted in the morning, and fearful of the next night’s sleep.  I weaned off of them, and went back to my simpler, albeit still very vivid dreams.

I made a decision last year to try and break my Groundhog Day cycle of unhappiness through more drastic means, and so moved to another part of the country this past summer. I knew intellectually I could not outrun grief. But I will say the change of scenery has helped me. (Visit: https://stantonwithau.travel.blog/).  I am trying to make new friends and connections, while still pining for old friends left behind in New England. Nothing is perfect.

But during the holidays, my resolve to keep at my daily mantra to count my blessings and find joy in my new town wear thin. The specter of Death still comes a’knockin’, having received my forwarding address.

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!” A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

And so this holiday season I watch with milder pangs as couples stroll down the beautiful main street of my Currier and Ives Virginia town – making plans, buying gifts, snuggling close to ward off the cold. I don’t wish to “drive a stake of holly through their hearts” to paraphrase Scrooge in the Dickens classic. I know moving forward does not mean forgetting. We just juggle the past with the present, and struggle to find that livable balance.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together. Charles Dickens

In memorial

A few Memorial Day’s back I picked up the phone to hear my sister Anna greet me cheerily with, “happy dead person’s day!”

The opener totally resonated with me and my macabre sense of humor.  Anna, who has since passed, also had a no-nonsense, Charles Adams sensibility to life and death.

I don’t mean to dilute or insult the symbolism of Memorial Day.  We have lost so many who have served our country on foreign soils and many who are serving still and wait at the ready if we need them.

I’ve been thinking of my dad today, a man who served in “the big one” WWII.  His Army unit famously crossed the Bridge at Remagen before it collapsed into the Rhine in the closing weeks of that war.

Like most vets of that generation (and maybe most generations) he did not talk about his time there, but we all knew it impacted and chipped his psyche in a way we could never relate to.  He came back from Germany to his Kentucky coal mining community a bit emotionally damaged but buried it underneath the constraints of the time.  He married, fathered five children, and pioneered a better life in New England.  Over the years and especially after retirement, his demons or whatever he had tamped down for decades, would surface and we would rally around to ensure he was safe until the episode passed.

My parents now lie in a veteran’s cemetery in Florida.  My mom went first, and I remember her graveside ceremony clearly.  There is a tower there that plays military-themed chimes on the beautiful cemetery property.  As they lowered her into the ground, “Anchors Aweigh” chimed in the distance.  I had smiled to myself over that.  Again, that macabre sense of humor surfacing to rescue me from the mire of sadness such occasions bring.

Stag nation

One study reveals that almost two-thirds of people who resolve to get healthy and fit in the new year give it up.

I’m not surprised by that at all. Following the excesses of the holidays, there is a certain “buyer’s remorse” over all of the bacchanal behavior we gave no thought to while immersed in the season of oversharing, overeating and overspending.

Continue reading “Stag nation” →

Give thanks

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my family like countless other Americans today.

For me it means getting on a plane and flying to Ohio or Tennessee to see my sisters’ and their families. We’re lucky. We all get along really well. It could be in part because we don’t spend much time together, but I prefer to think it’s just because we genuinely like each other.

Continue reading “Give thanks” →

Join the resolution revolution

Just when it seems darkest, one of my tribe reaches out with a Coleman lantern and waves it in front of my face.

I am fortunate to have a family I get along with. But since they have always lived an airplane ride away, I have formed wonderful relationships over the last several decades with many friends who I will now refer to as my tribe members, since the line drawn between friends and family has become so blurred.

Today, sitting drinking my morning coffee, I get a text message from one of the tribe elders, Pam.

“Call me when you are up. I have ideas!”

Many people besides myself were impacted by the loss of my husband. Pam has found it to be especially tough, coming on the heels of a year when she helped her husband through a bout with cancer (he is now fine) and other events which have made her question her life’s purpose at this juncture. It was a tough year for all, indeedy-do, in Pam’s lingo (and as I may have mentioned ever so tactfully, in a previous blog).

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This is not us but could have been (except for the gal holding the cell phone, as they were not invented yet when we were attending JFK Junior High School).

But Pam has already been trying to pull herself back up by her boot straps. We are part of a core group of friends who met in junior high school and camped together a lot. We gals thought nothing of packing a cooler and tent and heading for nearby Vermont for the weekend. We still see each other. Most of us went for a walk on New Year’s Day at a local park. We have more shared experiences than we could ever hope to remember. That’s why I know my friends were happy when I met James and married. At last I had found my mate as my friends had decades before me.

In either case, back to the text message. I immediately picked up the phone and without preamble, asked Pam for a run down.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m calling it six in six!”

“Like a lottery scratch off game?” I responded.

“Well, yeah…OK,” she said, used to my offbeat quips.

Pam’s idea takes the New Year’s resolution to a different level.  We would each commit to plan something to do together. It could be read a book, take a day trip, sneak into the movies, steal a car (haha) –  something we have either never done or want to revisit with fresh eyes, she explained.  She takes six months of the year and I take six months and we plan one event per month.

We are all familiar with the typical type of singular resolution. The gyms are full of them come January. This idea appealed to me. A new twist that could inject some life back into our lives. Something we both needed desperately. It recalibrates the stale idea of making a resolution. Create a roadmap of experiences to look forward to throughout the year and share them with a friend.

I could already feel a small ember in my core, starting to be fanned ever brighter by a light breeze. It was not a giant plan, we would never conquer Everest, but maybe it could inspire us on to bigger and better?

“I love the idea!” I said to her, already starting to think of what we could do as the year unfolds.

The wheels are starting to turn, a bit resistant due to recent rust formations but moving all the same. So I dare you – go ahead – foment your own kind of revolution in 2017.