Friday, December 20, 2013

Friday, December 20, 2013

Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2003. The process we went through to capture this photo is beyond memorable. Mattie was an active one year old and there was NO way he was going to sit still and take a Christmas photo. So I had the brilliant idea of taking him to Home Depot and Lowes. Mattie seemed to like these stores, though he wasn't wild about sitting in a shopping cart. During the holiday season, these stores are filled with lights and all sorts of decorations which captured Mattie's attention. So literally Peter and I entered Home Depot first, took Mattie's coat off, and started walking around the aisles until we found a good back drop. However, our Home Depot photos came out awful. So we put Mattie back in the car and drove to Lowes. We did the same thing at Lowes, we got Mattie out of the car, into a shopping cart, removed his coat, and started strolling around the holiday aisles. Here was one of the photos we captured and was featured on the front cover of our Christmas 2003 card!

Quote of the day: Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. ~ Hippocrates

It if funny, Los Angeles is only three hours behind East Coast time and yet for some reason the initial days here are always an adjustment. I was up at 4am, which is unheard of for me. I attempted to go back to sleep but by 6am, I got out of bed and decided to bake cookies. My mom had asked me to put a couple of cookie trays together for friends and I figured there was no time like the present. 

I remember when Peter and I used to take Mattie to Los Angeles as a toddler. Mattie had an awful time adjusting to the time difference. Literally for days Mattie would wake us up at 4am and be totally on and ready for a FULL day of activities. When I look back at those days, I thought they were challenging but in all reality they were a cake walk in comparison to managing Mattie's cancer. It is interesting how life experiences but other issues into context.

Neither of my parents are feeling well at the moment and therefore from my perspective I came to visit at the right time. Though I have no holiday decorations in our home in Washington, DC, I do try to decorate things within my parent's house for Christmas. One could try to analyze why this happens....  why it is easier for me to do this here than at home? I am not sure I have any real answers to this predicament, other than escaping DC and my own environment can serve as a temporary diversion. 

In my parent's neighborhood there is NO mistaking that it is the Christmas season. Many of the houses display a HUGE star on their front lawn. I mean HUGE. Each has to be 5 or 6 feet tall and it signifies the fact that the community is high up in the hills, close to the stars. I suppose one could even say these man made stars light the way, as a symbolic gesture of the bright star that guided the Wise Men when Christ was born. I can see lights everywhere, unlike where we live in DC. In our DC complex, very few people decorate and therefore it is much harder to develop holiday community spirit. 

Certainly one shouldn't need community direction and energy to feel the spirit of Christmas. However, I do find that now that Mattie is gone, I need more incentives, prodding, and energy from those around me to inspire me to want to engage in the holidays. Perhaps on some level when people encourage me to participate in things for the holidays, it gives me the permission to allow Christmas in. I say permission because no matter how many years go by there is a level of guilt and sadness that is ever present when you know you have outlived your child. I am not sure one ever gets over that feeling and instead the feelings become much more pronounced when holidays approach. Perhaps they become more pronounced too because if we do not focus on Mattie's memory, what he meant to us, and what we lost, who else will? My responsibility now as Mattie's mom is to keep his memory alive and I take that role very seriously from blog writing to running his Foundation. Losing a child to cancer is a journey that I wouldn't wish upon any parent because it is a true testament of resilience and survival.