I’ve written and rewritten this column a couple of times now.
Because it’s really hard to adequately express how you feel when you’re living through the first holiday season without your wife. But this is where we find ourselves. So here I go.
While putting up the Christmas tree in late November, I pulled from a box an ornament of two gingerbread people. I distinctly remember where Sarah and I were when the purchase was made — it was 2006 and we had been together for a few months and saw the ornament while walking past a booth at the Canadian National Exhibition. We had our names written on that ornament that day.
Another piece taken out of that same box was a Mickey and Minnie Mouse wedding ornament we got on our honeymoon in Orlando in 2010.
I cried for a good 30 minutes after decorating that damn tree.
It feels like getting those ornaments happened both yesterday and a lifetime ago. While the memories are vivid, we’d experienced so much since those early days — the birth of two children, purchasing a second home, family trips, new jobs, a pandemic, cancer and loss.
Sarah was Christmas crazy, even though neither of us embraced religion. The holidays were always about celebration, enjoyment of each other, and the excuse to gather with the ones we loved.
She cherished the season, more than any other, to the point where she’d take Dec. 1 off each year to decorate the house. No one could help her, either, because a tree branch out of place or an unruly decoration had to be corrected — she wanted perfection; it was the only way to achieve the full magic of the holidays. Even the menorah she surprised me with one year, a reflection of my family’s heritage, had to be in just the right spot.
I can still hear her singing along to carols from the living room as I sat toiling over work from my desk in the basement.
But while I knew it was important for me and the kids to remember, reflect and honour, I also saw this year as being about starting new traditions, exhaling after a long and difficult illness consumed our family for 2.5 years, and allowing us to enjoy, heal and live. So we all decorated. We went Christmas shopping together. We decided on the fly what holiday movies and specials to watch.
Our elves seemed to make some extra effort this year, too, dressing up in dolls’ clothing, building a zipline across the main floor and gathering “droppings” from enchanted creatures for a Magical Poop-seum.
And on Christmakkah, we ripped open our presents with excitement, gathered with family, stuffed ourselves full of delicious food and embraced the moment.
It’s hard for folks who haven’t experienced this level of loss to completely understand, but we’re doing OK. We’re not forgetting Sarah, nor moving past her — far from it. We talk about her almost every day, sometimes with sentimentality, and at other points joking about how she’d have done something differently.
This season has been about recognizing the complexities of an incredibly unusual situation, while trying to adopt Sarah’s spirit, with the belief she’d want us, ultimately, to be happy.
So I can now look at that tree with a different feeling in my heart. One less from a place of hurt, more of appreciation.
And I see a new year approaching full of hope and dreams and promise.
