‘If only in my dreams;’ dealing with loss during the holidays

As I write this column, I have tears in my eyes. I’ve just awoken from a dream about my grandparents, who passed on years ago. This is the second time in recent days I’ve dreamt of them so vividly.

It always happens at this time of year, and something similar has likely happened to you as well. As we pull decorations out of boxes and prepare for family gatherings, our minds wander consciously and subconsciously to those who will be missing from the festivities.

This month my family will mark seven years since my Grandmommy passed away. She died just two months before my daughter was born. I’ll never be able to think about that fact without crying. She wanted so desperately to be a great-grandmother. She even opined my daughter might inherit my husband’s blond hair; she was right.

She wasn’t lucid her last Christmas. I remember covering her in the blanket that I’d bought her and laying my head on her lap and crying during one of our last times together outside of the hospital.

I don’t remember my last Christmas with my Grandpoppy as vividly. He passed away 10 years ago during the summer. I think of him when I’m Christmas shopping and I see those little glass bottles of Coca-Cola that I would buy him each year.

He was a Kentucky boy through and through; he loved fishing and University of Kentucky basketball. I think of him during the UK-University of Louisville basketball games, yearn for his handicapping sessions and wonder what he’d think about how the game has changed over the years.

In the latest dream about my grandparents, my family was spending an extended vacation at their home. I took a bag of trash out the back door. I could hear the screechy sound of the screen of the porch door. I glanced over my shoulder and looked at my Grandpoppy’s truck parked in the half-circle drive by the fence.

I walked down the stepping stones and veered left toward the barbecue pit my grandfather built deep in the backyard and dropped the bag of trash over the fence into the alley. I smiled thinking about the beer that my Grandpoppy would give to the sanitation workers each Christmas (totally inappropriate and against policy, so exactly the kind of thing he would do).

And then the next instant I was awake on my couch, desperate to be transported back to that scene just one more time — not to the reality where another family is making memories in their house, the truck sold, and another holiday season without my family’s big laughs and hilarious stories of their wild adventures. I’m lucky that I had my grandparents, great aunts, and other family members as long as I did.

I know that I’m not alone. This holiday season, in particular, we have family friends and acquaintances who are living through nightmares, navigating through sudden, unexpected deaths, cancer diagnoses and other serious health scares.

In the face of such grief and sadness, it has seemed there aren’t enough prayers, GoFundMe fund-raisers or Meal Trains to go around.

It’s cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason: Enjoy this holiday season as if it will be your last.

Set aside your devices and be present with the ones that you love. Don’t get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of the season that you don’t make time to hug your friends.

Do something kind for families that will have an empty place setting due to a death, military service, substance-use disorder or other circumstance that keeps them from family at this special time.

And even if you will wake up in tears as I have, make time to dream.

This story was originally published December 24, 2018 at 12:31 PM.