unsentimental, until i wallow in it

Oh Christmas. Oh! Christmas!

I got married at Christmastime. Today would have been nine years for me and my original Blakie. I loved that it seemed as though everyone all over the city had decorated for OUR day. I bought a huge roll of silver and white wrapping paper to cover bulletin boards in the theater we married in, a roll so big that all our presents have been wrapped with it again this year, as they have been for the last nine years. I had no idea it would last so long, nor that it would outlast my husband. That is disorienting to me.

We used silver, gold, cream, white, and red glass ornaments of many varied sizes as part of the wedding decorations, and I have used them every year since. I love them. The stocking that was his became his son's, and is now Rob's until I have the time and memory to make us a whole new set of four that match. I am ruthlessly unsentimental about many things. Using this stuff may have caused a pang or two the first year or two, but no longer. I see them and love that I have things that are beautiful and that were used on a beautiful day, and I do not notice or miss the things that have broken or vanished over the years. Except that one major "thing" that both broke and vanished, a week after our second anniversary.

I wonder at the shape my sorrow takes as years pass. I do not actively miss Blake the way I used to. Memories are sweet and wistful and can move me to tears, but I'm very much caught up in the present chaos of life. I wonder if we'd know each other now, or what we'd be like as a couple had he lived. Those are usually short roads I do not wander along very long, because they are pointless and often painfully confusing. I trust that, when we get to see one another again, I may be permitted to sucker punch him in the gut (if I still feel like doing so), then hug him for about a hundred years. And I hope that it will simply be a sweet reunion and reintroduction, not a meeting of two who have been long since strangers.

I don't know how God organizes this stuff, but I know it will be perfect. Easy, even, as I introduce one earthly husband to another, which right now makes my gut wrench and my mind spasm with an "ACK! Awkward!"

It's hard to know how to commemorate this day now, too. I do not celebrate it - there's nothing to really celebrate anymore. I do not ignore it - it's a big deal to me. I just make others aware, not for pity, but out of the desire that Daddy Blake never be forgotten, even if the only way people know him is through the lens I've shaped. And I think that this year, I'll even look through our photos, though it will definitely make me cry (pregnancy hormones at this season again - what a roller coaster!). Because I want to, and that seems like a good enough reason for me.

Except then I found the two pics for this post and thought, "OH MY WORD! WE WERE LITTLE TINY BABIES!!!!" My bangs alone might move me to tears.