My friend Richard is hosting Happy Holidailies. The goal is to post daily on your blog from December 1st to January 1st. For those 32 days, I’m going to be making a short post on what the random prompt generator creates.
Prompt – Tell us about a non-major-holiday event you celebrate or remember at this time of year.
Warning folks, this one is a downer.
My father died at the end of November, just after I turned 14. It’s now tied up with both my birthday and the Christmas holiday.
Some years are better than others. The first several I didn’t really want to celebrate. Everything was a reminder that he wasn’t here. But over time, the pain became less. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sneak up on us occasionally, even though he’s been gone for over thirty-five years. It’s not the heavy mourning, but a lingering melancholy, especially now that his granddaughter, my niece, is old enough to take part in the holidays and we can’t help but wonder what he would have thought.
I, too, lost my father when I was 14, though not around the holidays. It was a bad year though: my grandmother died suddenly at the beginning of November and then my father passed in February after a long battle with cancer. The holidays weren’t so happy, but they didn’t get the same kind of direct association with loss.
Ooof. Yeah, that’s definitely a bad year. It’s not quite a joke, but we make comments on occasion that there should be a moratorium on deaths from November 1st through March 1st.