I've given you all a break over Christmas but now that we are full of cheese and mince pies and we are thinking about New Year I'm going back to my death series. As a child, I thought New Year was the day that all the celebrities died. It never occurred to me that they were just listing 12 months of deaths and so I thought of it as celebrity death day. I thought about things like death, as a child and thought that being a celebrity would be quite useful because at least you’d know you were going to die at New Year. Maybe that was unusual.
After I wrote about some of the things I found difficult at Christmas this year ( https://juliaofalltrades.blogspot.com/2018/12/christmas-and-death.html ) people seemed surprised.
"If only I'd known," they said and threatened me with hugs, or because I'm not a huggy sort of person a 'weird sort of rub on the arm'.
I was surprised that they were surprised. These are things I knew happened to the bereaved, even before I lost someone. They are normal things.
It was nice, though: to know that people care because you don't always know.
Then this weird thing happened. I got messages wishing me a Merry Christmas that came with the caveat that the person sending the message knew that I wouldn't. They said things like, "I know this year is going to be difficult but have as good a Christmas as you possibly can." Had I brought this on myself by talking about the normal aspects of grief at Christmas? Had I given everyone the impression that there could be no happiness in my life now that my parents had died?
Honestly, I had a nice Christmas. Any difficulties were in the build up and nothing could have been as bad as last year when I thought I was the only person who knew my mother was dying. In our death denying society, this was harder and so the blogs I'm going to write are my attempt to encourage you to think about and talk about death but today I just want to give anyone who is grieving, permission to be happy. Grieving is a roller coaster.
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