She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily… None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you.
Bark-brown fence post: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don’t love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Thanksgiving Day, I don't love you. Macy's Parade, I don't love you. Volumes of love within me. Nothing worthy to receive it. So it dams up. Clogs my throat. Clenches my fists. Presses behind my eyes. Rages in my brain.
Where is Rader? Where is the 8-year-old who made this turkey, thankful for his Nintendo Wii game system? The 10-year-old who included computer, video games, and again the Wii, along with food and home on his Tree of Thanks? Why does time keep trudging forward, why do holidays come again and again, why—HOW—does the world go on without him in it?
Boxes of Halloween and Thanksgiving and fall decorations, I don't love you. In fact I'm going to cull you down to just the kids' old school projects—like the toilet-paper-roll pumpkins—and a probably a couple of eyeball-themed things (beach ball, candle) because they make me smile a little bit. I'll keep the gobbling plush turkeys: the only reason I opened the boxes today to begin with. I don't care about those other decorations. They were for the kids. Anything my surviving child (home from college) doesn't want is going away: some to Goodwill, some to the trash. You mock my pain. I don't love you.
Observing the holiday the same way we did for 14 years in this house, only now without Rader, I don't love you. In fact, I hate you. Hear me? I hate you! How could you do this to me? How can we eat the same food in the same room off the same plates? How can we pass the cranberry sauce and the stuffing as if Thanksgiving were exactly as it always has been? How can I give thanks? I know, I know, I have so much to be thankful for. My own voice tells me that. And I do. And I am. But thankfulness, right now I don't love you.
Christmas celebration, I don't love you. Running away to Disney, that's an idea I love. Running away. I believe sometimes you need to run away. "Having an exit plan" is probably the best and most profound piece of holiday grief advice I've heard. Not feeling bound by anyone's expectations of how you should participate in any event, tradition, or ritual. Listening to yourself and being attuned to your own needs. Understanding that it's perfectly valid to choose to leave when that's what's best for you in the moment. And then sometimes the exit plan is running away. There are all kinds of exits. Christmas season, I don't love you.
Going through the motions, I don't love you. But that's what I'll do today. That and maybe throw out some old Halloween junk that doesn't belong here anymore. And hope that I feel some relief from that. Letting go of stuff that weighs me down. Ready to run, if 'away' is where I want to be.
"Happy Holidays," I don't love you. I do still love your music, some of it, and your twinkling lights. So maybe we can reach a truce. Not a truce, really, because it has to be entirely on my terms. Yeah, no, I don't love you.
No.