It’s Christmas Eve as I write this. Tomorrow won’t be the first Christmas I wasn’t with my mom; I have traveled and moved around the country enough that there have been a lot of years where I wasn’t able to make it home.
This is the first year that I won’t at least be able to call her. In less than a week it will have been six months since she passed away.
Six months of going through her stuff and deciding what to keep and what not. Six months of closing out her financial affairs. Six months of remembering that I can’t run upstairs and share the thought that I just had.
I wonder how long it will be before I stop kicking myself for the things I should have done; the things that I should have made time for?
It doesn’t help that tomorrow morning my wife and I will wake up to an empty house. It will be the first time since we met more than 30 years ago. The kids will stop by later in the morning, so it’s not like we will be alone all day. But it is a huge landmark, and I am not sure that we are ready for it.
Tomorrow we will spend the afternoon at my aunt’s house, as we have done every Christmas for the last 20 years. But this year, for the first time, my mom won’t be there with us. It’s going to be hard.
I know that the rest of my life is going to be filled with sad anniversaries like this, and I suppose it’s just an artifact of getting older.
But I don’t have to like it.
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