WELCOME TO WIDOWED WORLD

10 December 2009

Greetings,

Right now many of you will be facing the prospect of a first Christmas without your partner and finding it difficult to go about the seasonal activities and events with any degree of enthusiasm. You may decide to spend the festival doing all the things you would have traditionally done together, to get away from it all, or to do things totally differently. Whichever way, it’s important that your family and friends appreciate that you need to do whatever feels right for you. There will be other Christmas’ and each one can be different.

My husband adored home-made mince pies and had the capacity to eat them faster than I could make them. What I’d give now for the opportunity to bake them for him by the dozen – and I’d let him have as much cream or brandy butter as he wanted (both knowing him)!

Leading up to my first Christmas alone, I made about eighty cards on the computer then hand frosted and titivated them. The task filled many dark, lonely November and December evenings and was so much more rewarding than writing lack-lustre messages on commercially produced cards billowing with seasonal good cheer totally at odds with my own feelings. Many people commented that it was the nicest Christmas card they’d ever received.

We were married on Boxing Day – a double whammy now at Christmas time, and this year would have been our fiftieth anniversary. For the first time since before my husband died, some of the family will be coming home for Christmas instead of me going to them and on Boxing Day our extended family will come for lunch. It will be a particularly poignant event but with loving family around me, we will make it fun and special. To appropriately mark the anniversary, my film-making friends are helping me produce a short film, the story-line of which is loosely autobiographical and acknowledges the difficulty of handling anniversaries, the value we place on the kindness and support of those around us and the message that life can continue to be upbeat and adventurous if we choose to make it so. I get to have a Microlight flight in the film too!

Widowhood is so much easier to cope with when shared with someone in similar circumstances. Particularly in this season of goodwill, seek out other widowed people – there’s probably at least one not far from where you live – and enjoy some time in each other’s company.

With a heart full of compassion,

Jacquie