Christmas dinner

12.21.13

     That evening, we went and picked up my grandma on my dad's side for Christmas dinner. She has pretty advanced Alzheimer's, and I don't think she called me by name the whole night. But she sure wasn't shy about saying how good looking my husband is!
     We were sitting at the bar playing around on my iPad and I was trying to engage her in a conversation. It was really hard for me to not talk about Kaitlyn. I struggled for nearly the entire conversation about whether or not to bring K up, but I knew that if she didn't remember my daughter it would hurt, or even worse, if Mom and Dad had decided not to bother to tell her just because she wouldn't remember. Later, I would ask and Mom told me that she and Dad did tell my grandma about Kaitlyn, but at this stage in her disease she doesn't even recognize pictures of her own daughter that are scattered around her room at the nursing home. She just knows my aunt as "some really pretty girl." I was relieved that they had told her, but still sad that I wasn't able to talk to my grandma about it.

     During dinner, my Mom got up and turned on the Christmas music of Nat King Cole. The album starts out with an orchestration and slowly builds until his smooth voice comes in singing the Christmas Song. The start of this album has punctuated every Christmas I can remember. My Mom would encourage us when we were growing up to go and sit in the living room where our 7 foot Christmas tree was and just look at the lights when it was dark outside. I spent more and more time doing this as I grew up, mostly just appreciating the beauty of the tree and sometimes looking at the gold angel we had bought the year that Sheila died and put on top of the tree. I helped Mom pick out that angel because I wanted our tree to mean something that year.
     We always made a tradition of piling into the car and driving around looking at Christmas lights. This album was always in the CD player, and we would drive out to the nice areas of the city where the HOA's required putting up Christmas lights. Sipping our hot chocolate (and later in life, our Starbucks!) we would listen to the music and appreciate all the lights shining brightly.
       It hurt me to hear that song played again. The beginning of that album holds so many different memories across my 29 years, and I had so hoped that I would be making those same memories and traditions with Kaitlyn. I knew that Alex would probably roll his eyes and say, "She's 3 months old, she is not  going to remember this" but he would have done it anyways because I asked him to. He loves me like that.
       It was the same hurt that I experienced when we put up the Christmas tree and I thought about how pretty those lights would have been reflecting off of those chocolate brown eyes. I mourned the memories I had created in my mind of what Kaitlyn would be doing at this point in the year. I wanted to be able to hold her and talk to her as we looked at the Christmas tree and listened to an album that was made before I was born.
       I left the table for a few minutes and snuck into another part of the house to cry. I needed to let out my disappointment in the form of tears. It didn't take long for Alex to come find me and give me a big hug and let me know it was going to be okay. Mom asked if I wanted to turn the music off, but I didn't want that. I just missed our daughter.
       With our future kids, these memories will still be made, but there will always be part of me that longs for the Christmas of 2012 to have been our first Christmas with a little one.