It’s the thought that counts
I found A’s Christmas gift Monday, in a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog.
The first Christmas without him, 5 months after he died, was so painful for so many reasons, but the knife twisted just a bit more every time I went out Christmas shopping, saw things that he would’ve liked, and walked past them with tears in my eyes.
The impulses to do for them stay for so long.
E, bless his heart, told me I could go ahead and buy the gifts if I wanted to. But we talked about it and had visions of having to rent storage as the years went on; even in my desperate, grief-stricken state, I realized that would be less than ideal on several levels, though I gave E many points for offering the plan; it was exceedingly sweet of him.
Last year, the second Christmas, I found the perfect gift for A in a catalog. It was a miniature Gort, the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of his favorite movies. I cut the picture of it out of the catalog and put it in my journal that I write to him in. I told him about it and wished him “Merry Christmas.” It helped. It really did. It allowed me to do something with those impulses other than stifle them. If all I can do is send him my thoughts, well, then, that’s what I’ll do.
I cut out comics he would like, and I put those in my journal. Fortunately, it hasn’t gotten out of hand; I don’t have boxes of clippings for him. And it costs me nothing, but it saves me some of the hurt of having to deny my feelings of wanting to do for A. I don’t have to.
Is it a little odd? Sure, but it’s odd I can live with. “Odd” is par for the widow course, and this is pretty benign.
He’s getting a converter this year that makes digital photos out of your old slides and negatives. He had talked about wanting such a thing because he had a lot of slides, but the technology hadn’t reached gadget level quite yet back then. Now it has, apparently, and this is something I would’ve bought him, were he here.
I hope he likes it.