DIARY ENTRY – A Pity Party

Christmas is now wrapping itself around me like a plastic bag that goes over my whole body and gradually it is tightening and tightening until it smothers me. As each day goes, the pain gets worse. The memories. The abandonment. The rejection. The longing. It is turning into fear.

We will receive no Christmas cards. We will receive nor even have the ability to make phone calls. There is no one to phone us and no one for us to phone. We are very very aware of preparations for Christmas going around us. We even had a problem getting food deliveries as people had booked all the slots and you had to book early for Christmas but we didn’t know. We are alright for food but it really drives it home when we are told there are no spaces left because of Christmas. Christmas is something that cannot be avoided even if you want to. Everything is affected by it.

As many of you know, my brother and sister totally rejected us after my mother’s death. We now receive no phone calls from them and they would not answer the phone to us. It hurts. It has been said that we are better off without them, but true though that is, we have no one else.

However hard I try to not let it affect me, it does. And I keep going back in my mind to when things were different. Whilst my mother was alive, we did at least give each other gifts. Nothing much, but my brother and sister and my mother would have a gift to open from us, and we would have one from them. It was not so much the gift that mattered, but the contact.in the afternoon it was routine for us to ring my brother and thank him for the gifts. Also we would ring my mother. Now, there is no one to ring.

We can plan, all we like, to ignore Christmas, but the pain is still ignited by the things going on and being shoved in our faces around us.

Even if there was an emergency, we have no family or friends to ring.

It might be thought that maybe people have rejected us because we are not very nice people, but that is far from the truth. We are fun to be with, and all through our marriage we have had people who would have been alone at Christmas. Often we would have more than one. But now that we are alone there is no one.

My husband and I used to attend a Catholic church on a Sunday eveing because I played in a folk group for the Mass. i loved doing that, and we made many friends or so we thought. We were part of it and it was lovely. We have asked if one or two of those people might visit us now, since we are unable to go anywhere at all. This simple request has been ignored.

This might sound like a Pity Party and maybe it is, but the pain and fear are growing and growing. I tell it to go away, but then it comes back again. I hate it. My husband has lost his speech due to his post polio syndrome, and he can only string together two or three words. We cannot have a conversation. It is really hard. We cope. But at Christmas there will be no one to call on. Not that any other day is any different, but it feels worse at Christmas.

So that is my Pity Party. I will try to be happy again now.