What does Christmas mean?

One person's act of negligence has had a huge, never ending effect on our family. Each day, the loss of my brother-in-law is felt. I am still in the anger phase of grief. I don't know how any of us are standing and functioning these days. After losing 3 people I loved, my Mom, nephew Jason and brother-in-law Joe in the last 6 years, I am still very angry. I honestly don't and won't ever understand why they are gone and the dregs of humanity still exist. If God takes the good ones, then he needs to change his thinking and take the garbage out instead. They are the ones that need "saved",  not the loved ones that we hold so dear.

The holidays are coming. We will not be truly celebrating them. I miss that. I miss the family dinners and time spent together. We are all too caught up in our own grief to do so. It is painful and difficult to be together as a family when there are only the 5 of us now. The 3 that are missing were glue. Now we drift about, like corks on the water, broken into pieces by their loss and absence.

Every day is a struggle. We will never get over their loss, but we only learn to live with it. We haven't learned to do that yet. Their loss echoes on in our daily lives, just about every moment of every day. Six years for my Mom, 4 years for Jason and only 5 months for Joe... it seems as though it was yesterday for them all. Recently it was made clear to me just why Joe's loss has hit me so hard. I didn't just lose a brother-in-law. I lost a brother, a friend, a teacher, a nemesis and a brother-in-law. I've known Joe the better part of my life. His sudden and violent loss has shaken me. Sometimes knowing too much is not a good thing. I'm learning to change the movie of Joe in my head from what I know, both real and imagined, about his accident to a happier version, like when he caught my carpet on fire in my kitchen when he was using a blow torch. Or when I called him about a dozen times when I was at Lowe's looking for the parts to rebuild my kitchen sink and he and my sister laughed at the fact that I carried the entire drain into the store to figure out what parts I needed, with no help from anyone at Lowe's I'll have you know...

The cliche' that life goes on really does bite. No kidding, life goes on. Living life without these very special people plain and simple SUCKS. Watching my sister and nephew struggle with Jason and Joe's losses sucks even more. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all go away. I wish there were easy answers, but there aren't. So we take the proverbial one day at a time and try our best to move forward. There won't be Christmas here this year... at least not in the traditional sense or how others think it should be celebrated. What there will be is honoring and remembering the loss of these loved ones and others we have lost in our lives as well. I'm okay with that. It doesn't matter if others are. Their opinions don't really matter. So don't ask what we got each other for Christmas. You will be disappointed with the answer... nothing. Our true gifts to each other are peace and healing and that is this year's true meaning of Christmas for us.

Jason

Joe and Joey

Me, Mom and Sue