December 25-A Merry Christmas Day

Santa came!!

and so did the grandparents!!

We’ve got lotsa pictures to share from today!

seeing the evidence!

oh my! Santa’s pockets were so full of reindeer food that he dropped some on our floor. AGAIN!

The milk is gone Mommy!!

yes, that is a yardstick!

Demonstrating how this gift will be used…

Being a pirate and modeling his shark tooth necklace! Doesn’t he look like such a big boy here?!?!?!?

These were Aaron’s big Christmas wish, the Imaginext dinosaurs, which Aaron calls, “Dinosaurs in Gear.” He has been asking for these for the whole year.

oooh, cute new coat!

ARRRGGHH!!! An AWESOME pirate ship from NanaGrampy…

…which I will spend an hour putting together.

 

Can you see through the glare? My son SAW and CHOSE this gift for his Mommy all by himself…LOTR Pez dispensers!!

Somewhere between watching Aaron open gifts and sitting down to Christmas dinner, I realized I was truly having a nice day. I took nowhere NEAR the number of photos I usually take, which is a marker of how slow and reserved I was feeling. There were some lovely times of the day that I don’t have photos of at all, like when Sarah and Zack and the girls were over. I know that I didn’t feel it as deeply and joyfully as I usually do, but sometime during the day I noticed that I was actually enjoying myself. It was as if every desperate plea we made for this pain to ease was finally answered. It felt like the burden had been lifted, and while I knew that feeling was going to come and go, just knowing that it was possible was empowering, and it was an unbelievable relief. Just a little mercy and grace for us. We were given one precious day. I imagined that all the love and good wishes and words of support from people who had reached out to us had woven a net that lifted our pain from off of us and held it for us for a while. It really worked. We managed to have a good Christmas after all, to focus on Aaron, and to enjoy things as much as someone possibly could after going through what we have.

When we made it upstairs for the night, I expressed these thoughts to Chris, and wondered if he had thought about the day the same way. He said that the same thought had crossed his mind earlier in the day and he felt guilty for a moment, even thinking, “Wait, I shouldn’t be laughing! Why am I enjoying myself?”  I think this kind of thing is pretty common during grieving. It’s so so hard to reconcile all the different feelings that course through us, so quickly and unpredictably, and leaving so much raw damage. I would later experience that instant of griever’s guilt on the one month mark of when Mara died. But we snap out of it, sometimes at least, and we let ourselves feel good again. And the moments when we feel good will come more and more and we will learn how to live with this loss.

Merry Christmas.

December 24-Christmas Eve

Today for some reason I got this motivation to refresh all the flowers we had received. I have never had so many flowers before. The arrangements we received were all so beautiful, I just loved looking at them. They seemed to be the perfect example of girly beauty to me and I felt comforted by them. And I did stare at them A LOT. So I puttered about as if it were something truly important, rinsing the vases, adding more food to fresh water, and pulling off wilted leaves.

We got this beautiful white arrangement from Sarah and Zack and Zack’s family. I loved the squat square glass vase they came in.

We got this perfectly Christmassy bouquet from Kelly and Caleb and Cameron, and I heard a rumor that Caleb picked them out himself. :) We put them in a red vase and they were just the perfect addition to our Christmas table centerpiece. (How many times have I used the word perfect in this post so far?)

This sweet basket was from Chris’ brothers Ray and Randy.

These are two halves of a massive bouquet from an administrator at our school. He would have had no idea, but I appreciated the purple. I put half downstairs and the other half up in Mara’s room.

This HUMONGOUS basket was from our department. It was stunning.

This beautiful bouquet is from our school librarian. So purple and wonderful. I had these ones in our room.

My Mom made Christmas Eve dinner. I am pretty sure Ashley helped her out, and I am completely certain I did not do one single thing to help. It was a great dinner. We wanted to keep it simple, back when life was normal and we planned it, and one of our friends from work brought us a Honeybaked Ham, so it all worked out.

Aaron was TOO CUTE sitting down all seriously and using his knife. Who is that big boy? When I sat down to a full dinner that I didn’t even help make, I kind of had a moment of awareness that Christmas stuff was going on and that it was okay to enjoy my dinner. And I did.

After dinner we worked on some more Christmas cookies. Aaron, as always, did a great job with the sprinkles.

He set cookies out for Santa just perfectly.

My loving husband brought up the White Christmas DVD to our bedroom so I could watch it before bed, like I always do. I had started it earlier, but hadn’t thought about finishing because…I just wasn’t feeling it. But my hubby, he knows his wife. He turned it on and we snuggled up and it was the start of a very nice Christmas day.

December 23-the worst errand

Today Chris and I agreed that I needed to get out and walk around a bit. My pain was getting a little better and I knew some movement and fresh air would do me good. It was the day we were scheduled to pick up Mara’s ashes from the funeral home, so while we waited for that call, I went outside with Aaron. It was a cold windy day so he didn’t want to stay out for long. While he rode his bike around the cul-de-sac, I did really slow laps. I was definitely feeling the pain by the time we went in.

Here he is rejecting my picture taking efforts.

Eventually it was time for Chris and I to go pick up Mara’s ashes. Now you may remember that I said going to the funeral home to make the arrangements wasn’t as horrible as I imagined it would be. This visit…just as horrible as I imagined it would be. Worse. I took a small pink felt bag with us to put the container in. I had no idea how big the container would be or if it would even fit in the bag, but it seemed like the best thing to choose. We got the bag at the hospital. It was holding a little bundle of things made by a mom who had lost her baby. It included a small blanket, onesie, poem, journal, and some other things, along with a story written by the mother about her baby girl’s death. It had a ribbon handle and a butterfly applique on it, and when I read the story by the mother I learned that the butterfly is a symbol often used to memorialize infant loss. I certainly didn’t have any other plans for that pink felt bag, and didn’t want to put Mara’s container in a bag that had other meaning or use for fear that I would never want to use it again, so pink felt bag it was. We entered the funeral home, told the attendant what we were there for, and just stood there waiting. I dreaded seeing the container. How awful. We looked around at the odd wallpaper, bird cage, pink upholstery, and commented to each other in low voices about why funeral homes seem to have a requirement of creepy décor.

The attendant came back holding a small brown plastic box with rounded corners. He reached out to hand it to Chris and said, “Here’s your little angel.” His words jarred me deeply and I couldn’t accept what he was saying. There is no way around this…my baby was in that box. My child’s body was in a plastic container the size of half a shoe box. It is disturbing on the deepest level. Chris handed me the box and I stared at it and slid it into the pink bag, which was exactly the perfect size. I couldn’t look at the man who had verbalized that Mara was in that container. I clenched my teeth together fiercely. I know that if I took a breath too deep or tried to talk I would not be able to keep myself from crying. There was a document to sign that certified Mara Olivia Karayannis was in fact the person who had been cremated. Chris signed it, we walked out, and as soon as my feet crossed the threshold of the lobby the tears rolled slow and silent. We had planned to get some groceries we needed for our Christmas dinners, so we were headed to the store. I sat down and held that container on my lap and positioned my hands around it just so. I had a horrible feeling that it was the closest I would ever be to holding her again and I just couldn’t bear to have that box slide or be bumped. We drove to the store and waited a minute or two in the car while my tears just kept rolling. I was going to put the container down and leave it in the car while we went in the store. It was hard to make myself move. We walked in and made our way around the store really slowly. I remember that Chris and I separated for me to get something or put something back or something, and walking through that crowded store by myself felt so disorienting. It was a thousand times worse than the trip to Costco. I felt like I had a huge open wound on me that I was trying to cover with my jacket. Every step was an effort and I didn’t make eye contact with people. We came back home and I took the container straight upstairs to Chris’ closet, where it would rest until it was time to go to the mountains. I would not face the thought of her ashes in that container again until that day. There was always plenty of grieving to do without visualizing that.

I don’t remember much else about this day, except that my boys put on their new matching shirts from Ash and my Dad. Aaron started really getting into eggnog this year and they have been drinking it together. Just your standard store brand carton. Aaron loves it as much as any other dessert. They were cute.

The time when Chris and I went up to bed became the time we were doing our grieving together after holding it in for most of the day every day. We didn’t want to cry around Aaron all the time, and we were trying so very hard to be Christmassy as much as we could. I remember that on this night when we went upstairs I told Chris that I had no Christmas in my heart whatsoever. I didn’t feel a thing related to it at all. No excitement, no giddy giggles about Aaron’s reactions to his gifts, no pre-staging photos in my mind, no interest whatsoever in opening my own gifts, no desire to sing songs or watch White Christmas or wrap gifts or eat cookies. Nothing. For a Christmas lover like myself, that realization was not only sad, it was scary that not even Christmas could penetrate through my numb sadness. I didn’t feel it at all. I went through the motions, all of them, not only for Aaron, but for myself. I wanted to awaken something in myself. I wanted to feel happy. For the days leading up to Christmas, it didn’t work at all.

December 16

A Christmas movie on a Friday night :)

December 15

The cutest elf :)

December 14

Buncha phone pictures this week, but at least I have something!

We got our tree all done and set up finally!

Here is some work Aaron brought home…he had to write what a seed needs to be able to grow :) I love him!