Blink

I’m getting the Christmas decorations out of the loft tomorrow. It’s the first weekend in December, and when Steve was alive we never used to do it this early, but since he’s not been here we seem to have joined the neighbours who spend the whole festive month with the fairy lights on (as I type this there are at least three houses visible from my window that have had theirs up since last weekend, so it’s almost like we’re late, which is bonkers).

My colleague at work is sending her partner up the loft on Saturday to get theirs down too, so it’s obviously the weekend for it. She doesn’t go up in their loft, it’s his job.

I miss it not being my job.

The Christmas decorations always make me a little wobbly, because they remind me how quickly things can change. In the blink of an eye, it’s supposed to be, right?

Our lives didn’t get decimated quite in the blink of an eye, but we did put the decorations up in December 2018 full of seasonal hope and promise, and take them down in January 2019 knowing that Steve was never going to see another Christmas. And it did feel like the proverbial hit the fan in the blink of an eye.

Because I remember packing the baubles and tinsel and acres of fairy lights wrapped around rolled up magazines away under this weird cloud of doom, days into the hopeless terminal diagnosis that we were still trying to get our heads round, learning carcinoma words and palliative treatment options we didn’t really understand, and because I remember thinking how strange it was to have transformed the house for celebration, but it feeling fitting to be removing all visible vestiges of joy now that everything had utterly changed, getting the Christmas decorations down always feels like a bigger deal than it probably should.

In the space of them being up, nothing would be the same again.

Almost the blink of an eye and it all got broken.

I’m not superstitious. I don’t think that anything else portentous will happen while the decorations are up this year. The decorations had nothing to do with the fact that cancer was stealthily and silently setting my life on a totally different tangent, and taking the life of the one we loved. It’s just that we found out in between putting them up and taking them down.

But, much as we don’t like to admit it, life goes like that sometimes. In the blink of an eye everything changes. Where there once was happiness and the intermittent twinkling of colourful lights – a kaleidoscopically beautiful family life – there is now just a dark corner, with a scuff mark on the paint and the barely noticeable trace of an old spider’s web – a bit bleak, a bit sad, a bit lonely.

Getting the decorations down can make me feel like that. Going into a new Christmas season, another one where it’s all on me to deliver, can make me feel like that. Not that we won’t have a fabulous Christmas, we will. Not that we won’t make merry memories, we will. Not that we aren’t used to our reformed Christmas traditions by now, so much so that they will outlast the way we did it before. But still.

Let’s not pretend it isn’t hard. I don’t want to be the one going up into the loft. I don’t want to be the one making it all happen. I don’t want to be the one who took the decorations down knowing what cancer was going to do in the New Year, when we had been totally oblivious to any of it on Christmas Day.

But I guess really deep down, if you care to peel back enough layers, there’s a tiny speck of hope, the most miniscule remnant of faith, that would like to think that if the bad things can happen in the blink of an eye, the good things can happen too. That maybe the next right thing has to be to believe that one day there will be a season that starts in dimness and dusk but ends with the fairy lights twinkling. That maybe, around a corner, wherever that may be, there’s better coming. And that better, too, can come in the blink of an eye.

In the meantime, however I guess you’ll find me in the loft.