The stuff that insisted I write it first….

I first intended to write about something else--not because grief is compelling me to say it, but because I realized I was hijacking a fellow widowed friend's blog comment with content that was better suited to a blog post here--but as I started to write, the need to summarize and document last month insisted that it got first billing. Harrumph. But I hate to delete anything I wrote, and I always write with the intention of having a record for Anna to read someday of what life was really like after her dad died, so here ya go. I hope I get back to the post I originally meant to write in the meantime….

Posting anything on here seems to be only a rare, semimonthly event anymore. I take it as a good sign, since it means I have little to say about grief--or at least nothing new. Because for the most part, grief has left my life. That's not to say that it's always gone, or it never pops back up in some way, or that it doesn't affect me at all…but it's largely not a living, breathing factor that I have to calculate into everything anymore.

Now, being a single parent? It's the lens through which I look at things now--not being a widow.

Which is progress, and a huge improvement. I don't mind the shift at all.

Especially when I look back in hindsight and realize that December--or more accurately, the stretch from just before Thanksgiving until school resumed after New Year's-- was awful. Again. Just like it has been most years over the past 5 1/2 years.

I didn't really expect December to be difficult for me this year. Most things all year previous to it had been remarkably enjoyable and grief-free. Mother's Day, one of the trifecta tetrafecta of Big Awful Things on my widowed calendar, was fine. The summer? Enjoyable, despite it seeing the fifth anniversary of Charley's death. Anna's birthday? Nice and without a visit from the Grief Grumpies.

But that blasted six-week period from Thanksgiving to New Years was hard, curse it all. I found myself almost dissolving into tears as I cleaned my house on Thanksgiving morning before my family arrived for our big family dinner (which I hosted, insanely enough…but it went great, in the end). Anna had been gone at my parents' house for two nights, and I was all A.L.O.N.E. Most of the time, I rarely notice the aloneness of my house or my loneliness in the absence of a boyfriend or spouse, but for that day or two before Thanksgiving and on the morning of it, I noticed it. Horribly. And I noticed it too on Christmas Day. We'd gone to church in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve and spent the rest of the evening at my middle sister's house with the family members who could make it, and we had a nice time. I don't recall noticing too much about Charley on Christmas Eve, unlike the year before, but thoughts of him--and missing him horribly--hit with a vengeance on Christmas morning. Anna and I spent the morning at our house, just the two of us, opening her presents, eating brunch, and generally taking it easy before we went to my parents' house in the late afternoon for a small Christmas dinner (with only a small subset of us; the big family celebration would be the next day). And the tears actually hit me in the early afternoon at our house on Christmas Day--something that's never really happened since that first Christmas after Charley died. Perhaps it was just because we'd spent too much time home on the holiday that day and had no other distractions. I've found through long, hard-wrought experience these past 5 1/2 years that I do much better when I have distractions around me.

My wedding anniversary wasn't much better. It was supposed to be our…ummmm...[quick moment to count]...seventh anniversary, on December 7. Falling on a Tuesday this time, Anna had school so I did the mom/school-prep-and-schlep act in the morning and then I scheduled a massage and facial as a treat for myself in the morning…somewhat intentionally planned so that my parents would have to pick Anna up from school and I could thus have a whole kid-free day to myself. Except the massage was awful. It's not worth recounting any of the reasons why, but it says a hell of a lot that I was having to fight off tears during the damned massage and that I fully dissolved into them when politely voicing my disappointment afterward to the spa manager. (One of the only saving graces during the awful 90-minute experience was that I was composing parts of a blog post in my head, which would have been titled, How a Bad Massage (as a Widow) Is Worse than No Sex on Your Wedding Anniversary. But needless to say, the post never got written, nor posted on here.) The spa manager couldn't have been nicer or more understanding or supportive--particularly when I told her that it was my wedding anniversary but that my husband was dead--and I had a nice (enough) rest of the day, visiting a friend and then having dinner with another one. But it still didn't change that one HUGE blight on the day.

So in the end, what was the tally for My Annual Widowed Juggernaut?

Thanksgiving? Hard.

The total, crying, sobbing meltdown I had the Monday after Thanksgiving--a grief meltdown like I haven't had in probably a year or more? Sucked.

My wedding anniversary? Sucked.

Charley's birthday? Remarkably fine. (Anna and I went to the Oregon professional ballet company's Nutcracker performance with my middle sister and her daughter in the evening, and we baked some Christmas goodies in the afternoon and went to a yummy dinner with them before the ballet. All in all, a very nice day…a great one, even.)

Christmas Eve? Okay/fine/nice.

Christmas Day? Crappy.

New Year's Eve? I wasn't in the mood for it so sent Anna and I to bed at 11pm.

Yeah, no wonder that December seemed like a hard month…except I wasn't quite perceptive enough at the time to realize that it was grief at work. I mean, some of it I knew was because of sadness, missing Charley, etc. But still. I hadn't expected it to be as bad as it was, which is never a pleasant surprise--particularly now that I'm as far out from Charley's death as I am.

But January has bloomed and been spent much more pleasurably and calmly…so thank goodness for that.

And now that December is a month behind me and the wobbliness has generally shrunk back to its normal, pea-sized proportions in my gut, I can look back at last month, too, and know that much of its difficulties were because of the stress, unsettledness, and fear that I felt in November. I was ripe for a difficult December, with all that emotional ickiness weighing me down to begin with.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. I should have known better. I should have known to expect--no, REMEMBER--that December is usually a hard month. I….

But I didn't remember, or think of it. So going forward, I suppose my official party line about December should be this:

Some years are harder than others, even now.*

(And in postscript:
*And I never know which it'll be until January, after it's done.)