My relationship with my father has never been deeper.  I connect with him now, more than 4 years after he passed away, on a level I never did while he was alive.  Don’t get me wrong, we had a great relationship in life, it’s just that now there is nothing left unsaid and nothing not understood.  He also has no more ego issues to work through.  He has returned to his spirit form.  He guides me through my ego challenges and, yet, lovingly embraces all parts of me.  Purity and love define our relationship now.

As you may have gleaned from my previous posts, I pay a lot of attention to my energy vibration and consciously work to keep it elevated so that my life reflects what I want, not what I don’t.  That being said, my energy vibration has been low the last couple of days.  I could see myself reacting to situations, that although frustrating, would not normally cause me to sink into the abyss.  At first, I chalked it up to the busyness of this time of year, the ‘go, go, go’ mentality that we all seem to have now that makes everything feel like a race to ‘get it all done’ so we can relax and enjoy family time.  My energy being low seemed logical as we travel for Thanksgiving which means I have to organize, pack, try to meal plan with my dietary guidelines, and purchase Christmas gifts for my nieces and nephews whom I won’t see at actual Christmas but see at Thanksgiving.  But, yesterday I was off.  Pure and simple.  My daughter had a bad morning where she felt like the world was against her (which it wasn’t), both of my kids were complaining about ‘lack’ from their perspective, and my son encountered some situations that seemed less than fair.  God love him, he rolled with it much better than I did.  I was just GRUMPY.  I was not that pleasant to be around.

Today I woke up determined to be better.

I began with a meditation that had me just about to go to that special place inside until our puppy decided it was time to jump on my chest.  I got up, still undeterred from my task to turn it around and went to the study, turned on my awesome fountain, drank my hot lemon water and began to read from a book that brings me great inspiration…until both of my kids woke up and immediately needed my help.

OK Universe, what’s up?  Why do you seem to be deterring me from getting happy right now?  It felt like a conspiracy…

Next, I went to the grocery store and rushed around filling my cart with I’m not even sure what because my husband was due at the ball fields for his next game in a softball fundraiser.  At the check out, I got in the slow lane, naturally, behind a lovely woman engrossed in conversation with the cashier.  My better self would simply not permit me to make any noises or clearing of my throat to move their conversation along and, instead, I listened.  Both of these women seemed oblivious to the frantic pace and it made me relax, just a bit, hearing their words.  Finally, when it was my turn, Linda, the 70-something cashier began talking to me.  We started talking about Thanksgiving and how it was her favorite day of the year because it was so peaceful, there were no gifts to purchase and wrap, and instead it could be a day to savor life.  I began to respond about how much I loved Thanksgiving for the same exact reason when instead, from somewhere deep inside me, I said “I used to love Thanksgiving until my father died a few years ago.”   Wow.  Where did that come from?

This lovely, compassionate woman, with whom I shared some good conversations in the past few years, responded that “Thanksgiving has never been the same for me since my parents passed away”.  This struck me.  Linda is in her 70s.  I had always heard that the heart never truly heals but I always thought there was a point at which it did.  Surely it must.  Linda helped me to understand that although we move forward, and find reasons to be happy again, including her now love of Thanksgiving, when we lose someone who means so much to us, moments like Thanksgiving bring all that hurt and loss and longing back in a direct and profound way and you can’t escape it.

I cried all the way home from the grocery store.

Why do we Push Our Way Through?

Thanksgiving was my father’s favorite day of the year.  He loved it for all the simple and beautiful reasons we all love it.  It is time with family and friends, without work or extracurricular conflicts and without gifts.  It is a time to simply be present with those we love.  It is a time to SAVOR.  So when someone you love so dearly, with whom you spend all of your Thanksgivings isn’t there, you feel it…deep in your core.  It is an ache.  It is a longing.  It is a catch in your throat.  It is the wish that you could bring that special person back, sit them in their favorite position at the table and savor them, just one more time.  Being spiritually-aware, I fully know that my father is at the Thanksgiving table but it is simply not the same as having him physically present.

For those who haven’t experienced the loss of someone so close to their hearts, the holidays are often about trying to top the previous year’s magic.  The holidays are often about perfection and about creating the magazine-cover holiday bliss.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  We all have those extra special holidays that we longingly remember that for some indescribable reason were just simply more awesome than the rest.  For those who know deep loss, however, the holidays are often, at best, trying to make this year as happy as years when our loved ones were still here, but more often just trying to make it through.

This is my family’s 5th Thanksgiving without my father.  The first, just a few months after he passed was pretty shitty.  We all moved through the motions of it, in a new setting as my mother had moved to a townhouse, all holding back the pain and tears and putting on a brave face for the benefit of the group and of the kids.  At the time, I was also still newly-diagnosed with the brain tumor and was trying to find my footing in that new role.  The other Thanksgivings, while enjoyable, still left that hole in all of us I believe.  I thought it would get easier, but somehow, it hasn’t for me.

It got me thinking that maybe part of the problem is the way that we try to go on, in the same traditions minus one special person or forge new traditions to replace what we have lost.  Americans don’t grieve well.  We set a time limit and expect to be done when it is socially acceptable to be done.  Americans value strength and fortitude and resilience but at what cost to our psyches?  I am Irish Catholic.  My experience is that Irish Catholics bottle up the bad feelings and stick them in the back of the closet where no one can see.  I still don’t know the reasons why some of my elderly relatives had some of the peculiar habits they did.  These are things that were never spoken of and went with those relatives to their graves.  But learning what I have from my own health challenges, I see how destructive a pattern that is.  Emotions that are not expressed get stuck in the body.  They become our pockets of pain and disease that we then carry like baggage with us indefinitely.  Cancer, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes.  These diseases all begin as feelings we choose not to fully express and instead store for ‘safe keeping’ where the world won’t see them and realize how messed up we actually are.  I remember an RN at Dana Farber telling me that 50% of the cancer patients she saw had experienced a traumatic shock, loss or event in the 3 years preceding their diagnoses.  I have read this in countless other sources too; just not in any western medical journals that still believe the body is made up of parts like a car, without a soul and with little respect for emotions and thoughts and other intangibles except to silence them with medication.

So I was surprised, to say the least, when my tears started flowing.  I process my emotions every day.  I work hard at it.  When I feel bad, I ask myself why and let the honest answers come out of me so that I can heal it and move forward.  Now I see that all of my grumpiness and over-reaction to rather minor issues were just breadcrumbs on my trail to discovering that I was still harboring this intense loss.  In my day to day life, I embrace my new relationship with my dad but on Thanksgiving, his and my most sacred of days, I am still at a loss.

Creating a Ritual of Honor for our Loved Ones in Spirit

I think the Japanese have it right here.  Each year the Japanese observe one of their most important Buddhist festivals– Obon or the Festival of the Dead.  This is a 3 day event for families to return to their home towns, clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones and celebrate their lives.  Most of the country takes the days off.  People dance and sing, light bonfires, release lanterns, and leave food offerings to their loved ones in spirit.  We don’t do this here.  We celebrate our loved one’s lives as part of their funerals but then we, ostensibly, move forward.  We continue to grieve privately but we generally don’t share our sadness with others because we don’t want to bring them down and because it is desirable to look strong.  It’s no wonder, then, that we feel lost when events like Thanksgiving are upon us.

As I told my dear friend Trish how I was feeling and that I knew what I would be writing about this week, she shared with me a beautiful tradition her mother practices in which she drinks a coffee with 2 creams and cherry pie, neither of which she normally enjoys, on Thanksgiving because they were her own mother’s favorites.  It is a way for her to physically connect with her mother through those things her mother enjoyed.  I love this touching act.  I intend to start a similar tradition in my father’s honor and as a way for my father, in spirit, to embrace the day of Thanksgiving physically.  I imagine I will choose Tia Maria liqueur and coffee with whipped cream as my homage.  I could choose creamed onions or cigars but I think they might make me sick…

Giving Ourselves Permission to Feel the Grief

I am grateful for my tears today and for my ability to be honest about my deep longing for my dad.  I intend to celebrate his life on Thanksgiving, his most sacred day and now his personal Obon, but I also give myself permission to feel the grief.  I give myself permission to not be at my best this week.  I give myself permission to check out from the chaos and spend some time alone to regroup and find my higher energy vibration when it starts to get depleted.  I give myself permission to allow whatever is meant to be to manifest and know that no matter what, everything will be OK.  I intend to savor it all.

Writing heals me on many levels so I know that I wrote this post for me, but I also know that I wrote this for all those people who walk a similar path.  We are the silent sojourners who don’t wish to break up the party.  But we simply can’t push our way through this.  Perhaps by creating your own Obon tradition, a tradition of celebration and remembrance,  by inviting your loved ones in spirit to reclaim their place of honor at your table, you will find that Thanksgiving and all sacred events will become days to look forward to and to savor rather than to try to ‘get through’.  I hope so.

Peace and blessings to all of you this holiday season and always.

Erin