(originally published December 28th, 2005)<\/p>\n
I hope everyone had a very nice Christmas; those who celebrate Christmas, that is. Once again this year, I went to my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house for the holiday. Both of my wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s parents are gone, as well as her grandparents, and I still have Mom and my grandmother.<\/p>\n
This year was the best year out of the last 3 years for two reasons. One, I had the money to buy Mom lots of stuff, as well as my grandmother and wife. Two, Mom is finally coming out of her 3 year funk for Christmas since Dad passed. Christmas was my dad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite holiday. Each year, even once I moved out, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d put up the Christmas tree, decorate it himself, then set up his train set to go around the living room, making sure it passed by the tree often. He always did most of the decorating, because he loved it.<\/p>\n
Knowing this, Mom went into a holiday funk each year afterwards. This year, because we had to get something else, was the first time in years that Mom has gone into a store other than a grocery store around Christmas time. The first half hour was very emotional as she started thinking about it. I stayed close, and stayed with her and my wife as we had other business to tend to that day. Eventually, she started coming around and feeling better, and at the end of that day she said that maybe she was ready to get out and about once again, since, after the initial emotions, she started enjoying herself. Then again, who wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enjoy themselves hanging out with me? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
There is this thing about grief that says each person deals with it in their own way, in their own time. In the past, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve talked about grief and how tough it is when working for a company because each company has rules for how much bereavement time a person gets, yet most of us know that if you bring someone back just because the rules say so that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re probably not getting someone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at full attention. In my case, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come out of the initial funk until almost 3 months later; imagine how well that would have worked if I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t self employed.<\/p>\n
As we get close to the new year, take some time to think about those who have gone from our lives this year, those who have gone from our lives in the past, those who have gone from the lives of people you know, and have a compassionate moment for their loss; I bet you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re missing someone today. At least they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not forgotten. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(originally published December 28th, 2005) I hope everyone had a very nice Christmas; those who celebrate Christmas, that is. Once again this year, I went to my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house for the holiday. Both of my wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s parents are gone, as well as her grandparents, and I still have Mom and my grandmother. This year was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}