This particular year, I'd have been happier not to link Christmas and funerals, although I suppose it was inevitable. There's no way the first Christmas without my father will pass without us noticing it, and reflecting on it. Indeed, it's shaped the holiday already to a tremendous degree. For the first time my wife and I are taking on almost all of the duties of preparing for the family celebration, instead of my father and mother. My father is dead, and my mother is gone off to visit her newest grandbabe. It's on us to put everything together, and I will pick the various family up at the airport on Christmas Eve.
But I don't mind. Truly, in a way, it's been the more meaningful for all that. I'm looking forward with pleasure to their happiness at experiencing what we have put together with so much labor.
I don't know what it will be like without the old man, though.
There's no reason you should have. One of the liberating lessons of life is that no one is thinking about you. They're following their own thoughts, as you said. Almost everything people take to have been an insult or offense turns out to have been nothing more than a coincidence.
4 comments:
This particular year, I'd have been happier not to link Christmas and funerals, although I suppose it was inevitable. There's no way the first Christmas without my father will pass without us noticing it, and reflecting on it. Indeed, it's shaped the holiday already to a tremendous degree. For the first time my wife and I are taking on almost all of the duties of preparing for the family celebration, instead of my father and mother. My father is dead, and my mother is gone off to visit her newest grandbabe. It's on us to put everything together, and I will pick the various family up at the airport on Christmas Eve.
But I don't mind. Truly, in a way, it's been the more meaningful for all that. I'm looking forward with pleasure to their happiness at experiencing what we have put together with so much labor.
I don't know what it will be like without the old man, though.
By the way, I went by McGreevy's when I was in Boston this fall, just because of this song.
I'm sorry to have been the source of the link. I was just following my thoughts this evening and didn't think about your year.
It's good that you're there to carry on the traditions. That's a more valuable thing than most people realize, I think.
There's no reason you should have. One of the liberating lessons of life is that no one is thinking about you. They're following their own thoughts, as you said. Almost everything people take to have been an insult or offense turns out to have been nothing more than a coincidence.
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