Holidays are a special time, a time when memories are made. Sometimes those memories are good, and sometimes they are not so good but for me they are something I hold onto as I age as markers for who I was at a particular time and the people who have made my life what it is.
This morning, I woke up and felt very emotional for some reason. It is the fact that it is getting close to Christmas? I don't know but I am. I cried for no apparent reason, I just felt weepy so I did and now I feel better. I wanted to write about two experiences I've had with Christmas that made me really feel like life is such a complex mysterious thing that always has a way of surprising me when I least expect I no matter how jaded I think I am.
Thirteen years ago, the first Christmas after my Mother died I was alone. I was still pretty numb and really wasn't feeling much except pain and longing and the worst ache and loneliness you can possibly imagine. Nothing made sense, I was just so inconsolable there was no point in trying to feel better, I just needed to feel my feelings and process my grief. I really don't think a person can ever be ready to lose someone they love very deeply. Even if you know it's coming, it just never makes sense. My mom died on my shoulder while I was driving her to a Dr appointment. It was a complete shock to look over and see her lifeless. Heart attack. She wasn't feeling well, I was visiting her upstate. She told me she couldn't breathe and she slumped over on my shoulder and that was it. I drove her car down the middle of the road in between the oncoming and going traffic. I got her to the E.R. She was revived. I told her I loved her, that I was going to make her proud and to never scare me like that again. She told me she loved me too but she was too sick to really talk. She was transferred to a better hospital where at 9:10 pm, she died again. And that was that.
After that, I plunged into a haze of shock and grief. She was my world, my everything, We had a very tempestuous relationship, my mother and I, but we loved each other intensely. I have no living siblings and my Father died when I was 5 so her leaving me was really the ultimate nightmare for me. I had no one. Friends were too freaked out by this and didn't know what to say so they didn't say anything and avoided me. My then room mates kicked me out because one of them had a friend from Japan coming and she had no place to live. Somewhere in all of this the one person who actually was there for me, my best friend, died from prostate cancer and I only found out after I could not get in touch with him for a week. His daughter told me. He did not want me to know he was sick because he didn't think I could handle it so he hid his illness from me. Oh, I also lost my job. So I was friendless, jobless, poor ,had no place to live and was totally alone. You could say I hit rock bottom. There was pretty much no lower to go than I had traveled.
Fast forward through some very, very tough times but I eventually found a job, and met the best friend a girl could ever have. She is like my sister and I love her dearly. She loves me and accepts me unconditionally, like family would, or should. I found a job and I found a place to live from a landlord who knew my story and gave me cheap rent just because he felt sorry for me and knew what I had been though. In NYC, that is pretty much unheard of. Angels were on my side and I began to see that there was a force helping me, within me, beside me. I couldn't put a label on it but it was like a flame within me that kept me going even though I seriously wanted to die on a daily basis. I remembered when I was at the hospital when my mom was near death and I sat with a hospital Chaplain in the waiting room and I said "how am I going to get through this? how am I going to go on?" That man looked at me and said "this is where your faith comes in". I was so pissed! I screamed at him and I said "FAITH? FAITH? WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT AND HOW DO I GET SOME?". Now, I laugh at that and I wonder what that man must have thought of me. I was and still am not really a religious person. Even so, after all the things that happened I began to realize that no matter how bad things became, they always came back up from the depths. Faith, faith. Did I finally have it after all that? I think I was beginning to understand what it was and growing it .
For me, faith has been trusting in the fact that things will always be OK and not needing my mother to tell me so. Knowing that no matter what happens, I will make it, I will be OK. It may be a different OK than I imagined and the turbulently oceanic waves of life may keep pounding at the shore that is me, but the shore will still be there, strong and beautiful in a different way than it was before those waves altered what it was before the storms.
The week before my Mother died we were sitting on her back porch and I looked at her. She was stunning and I told her so. Her skin and eyes were glowing. She blushed when I told her how beautiful she was. We sat there together as the sun set and held hands and talked about life. Looking back, maybe we both inherently knew that we were going to be saying goodbye for a while very soon. I don't know but we seemed to have really come to an understanding of each other and all our bad stuff was behind us, we were truly best friends. I looked at her and I asked her a strange question. I said "if you could come back and give me advice after you died, what would you tell me?" She thought for a minute and she said "I would tell you to never make anybody so indispensable to you that you think you can't live without them because you can and you will. Also, lots of people love you but you have to LET them. If you let people love you, you will never ever be alone. " She knew me so well, years later I still think of those words and they haunt me. Letting people in, letting them love me is the hardest thing for me but I've managed to surround myself with a few amazing people who have stood by me through thick and thin and it was a very hard thing for me to do. The reward for doing it though has been immeasurable and I continue to try to keep an open heart to the people I meet as best I can.
The Christmas experiences I want to tell you about are extremely special to me and make me smile with inner peace and joy when I think of them. The first year after my mom died, I was in my new apartment, alone and feeling depressed beyond belief. I fell asleep and I seemed to be in this half asleep//half awake state. I felt like I was walking through snow at dusk toward the house where I grew up. It was cold and getting dark and I looked up from where I was and I could see the kitchen light on in the window of the house and I instinctively knew that my Mother was in that kitchen. The strange thing was, I was aware of the fact that she was dead. I was thinking to myself, "what is going on?" , but I was intrigued and kept walking. I got up to the house and I went inside. I smelled something good and I took my boots off and opened the door and there she was, my mother, in her favorite taupe turtleneck sweater with polka dots, taupe pants, glasses, just smiling and looking at me. I said "what are you doing here? you're dead!" She smiled back at me and she said "I know but I had to come back to see you because I know this is your first Christmas without me and I've seen how sad you are. I wanted you to know that I am still with you, you just can't see me anymore but I'm right here!". I ran up to her and I sat in the kitchen chair in front of her and she put her arms around me and pulled my head into her stomach. I could feel her. I could smell her. It was real. I cried and she wiped my tears away. She was holding her recipe box and I said "why are you doing that?". She said 'I'm trying to decide what to make for Christmas". I said again, "but you're dead!" She said "We'll it's hard for me to let go too you know!" Then we just hugged, and she felt warm and soft and I could feel her breathing in my arms. I felt her hands gently cradling my head. Then all of a sudden she pulled back a little and she said she had to go. I begged her to stay and she said she couldn't, that she was only here to tell me that she was still with me and still loved me and that everything was going to be OK. I asked her if she could see me everyday and she said yes but she couldn't watch when I was crying because it made her feel bad and it was too painful for her to see but she was definitely still there. I began to cry and I begged her not to go but she seemed to fade away and I woke up. I could still smell her. It was so real. Did my grief manufacture the experience? Cynical, scientific types will say yes, that I was in so much pain I imagined it but I don't believe this. It has happened since then as well. When I went back to school, when I got engaged. She always comes back to have a chat with me at these times and we both realize that it is a gift because she has passed on to another existence and she is only visiting me.
The second experience still takes my breath away when I think of it. It happened Christmas day, 5 years ago. It started that morning, I was laying in bed with my boyfriend, we had just woken up. I was in a funk and missing my mom, holiday blues. I was grateful for having him and for having his family accept me and love me but nothing takes the place of your true blood family and I felt that familiar ache for that bond that I now do not have. He looked over and me and hugged me. The thing about him was that he always knew what I was thinking at these moments and he never ever made me feel like it was something I should be "over". He knew how hard it has been for me and he accepted that part of me that no one else ever really has and probably never will. I never felt like a freak with abnormal attachment to my mother, I felt like a girl who missed a person she loved very dearly. It is such a big part of me that I think it is part of what keeps me from trusting people and letting them in, at this point, I don't even bother telling anyone about my past experiences because its almost too sacred and hard to talk about and I don't seem to be able to trust in that they will get it and understand me and my pain from my losses. On that day, he said to me "you miss your mom don't you?". I said yes and he held me and said he knew and that he loved me and we were going to have a nice day together. It was at that moment that I said exactly these words, "I would give anything just to see my parents faces again, to feel them hug me and to hear them wish me a Merry Christmas". And with that, we got up, got dressed and went off to his mothers house to spend the day with his family.
An important detail I must share with you is the connection between our families. His great Aunt married my Uncle many many years ago. They are both deceased but our families knew each other for many years, since the 1940's. Flash forward to now. His Uncle is a big home movie buff. Remember the reel to reel projectors? He had one of those and filmed every holiday gathering for years. We are both Italian, these gatherings were huge and there were always so many people you lost track of who was who after a while. Uncle Danny eventually decided to take all these home movies and put them on a tape for viewing on a modern VCR/DVD player. The tape was completely unorganized. It was eight hours long and no one has every watched it. My boyfriends mother had it and on that Christmas day that he and I were there, and she popped it in and we had it on in the background as we ate and talked. We weren't even really watching it and we didn't even know half the people on it. All of a sudden, his Mother called out to me "OMG! Look! Isn't that your Mother?" I looked up and sure enough it was! And not only that, my Father was sitting right next to her and they were holding a baby on their laps and that baby was ME! They both looked directly into the camera and waved and smiled and said "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"
Everyone in the room that day was stunned. People cried. No one could believe it. It was as if someone heard my words earlier that morning wishing for my parents to hold me and wish me a Merry Christmas and they granted me that wish. We rewound the tape and watched it again. I was so full of love and had such a feeling of support and acceptance at that time, I will never forget it. It was as if I got a confirmation that I am loved and protected and I still remember that feeling now when I feel forgotten and alone.
So today I am sitting here in my bed typing this and I am smiling because I feel that faith that I didn't seem to have before is right here with me today. Life may be uncertain and scary at times but there is one thing that will always be with me no matter what and that is love. For me, love is timeless, ageless and knows no dimensions. It will find you and stay with with you through the best and the worst and the magic of it is in believing in it and in trusting that it is still there even when life makes you question it. It is what makes being human such a wonderful and unique thing.
Happy Holidays to everyone and I hope you enjoy the season with those who you hold dear! xoxo
PS: the title of this thread was taken from a fabulous book called
"The Magic Of Believing", by Claude M. Bristol, that was recommended to me by my best friend before he died. I read it cover to cover a few times and it really made such an impression on me that I wanted to share it with you. It was originally written a very long time ago, I believe in the 1940's long before the self help movement. It was then seen as good common sense and the message it shared has stood the test of time all these years later. It really helped me get through a time in my life when positive thinking was the antidote to my woes. I highly recommend it!
