The First Halloween
The first Halloween without Grant, I was annoyed at all the pictures of families, the ones with dads planning, coordinating costumes with their children. This is a favorite holiday of our children and like usual, it is stressful for me as I tried to appease all the costume desires of 4 different boys.
Boys who have individual ideas of where they want to go at any given moment as well as how much candy they’ll be acquiring. Then there’s the long term effects of all that sugar on their mood, attention, and behavior. One thing that’s not difficult is getting them in their costumes. They love dressing up, it’s a chance to be something different, and it’s exciting.
Well, if I’m trying to force a theme, thereby wanting them to dress up in what I want them to dress up in, suddenly it’s a chore to even dress them in costumes, let alone go trick or treating. This year, I wasn’t having that fight. I just didn’t have it in me.
It was easy to dress them as I like, up to age 4. Then a little boy wants to be a superhero or something gruesome. Since I have 4 boys, a theme that matches all 4 and pleases all 4 is pretty rare; well, that’s an impossible feat. This realization is coming from a woman who looks at the world through the eyes of limitless possibility. I know when to surrender and this was that type of moment.
I knew exactly what I’d dress up as. I saw all those happy couples, scattering their plans of happiness through dress up for the holiday, all over Instagram. The ones whose spouse was still alive. The ones who still had each other, and this was just another holiday to them. I wanted to dress up in a matching costume with my spouse too.
I wanted to hold on to the tenderness of togetherness. The sweetness of cute and the possibility that I wasn’t really alone. It had been 4 months and 2 days on that first Halloween. I was well underway toward accepting the reality of the death of my husband. However, I was still so enveloped in the shock of the trauma, that I still wasn’t fully aware of my situation.
I was getting through each day, one day at a time. Waking up and going to bed were both my biggest victories still, but even that was actual progress. These Holidays sure put a kink in the routine of being able to wake up and go to bed. It took planning. It took effort, concentrated effort and planning.
The boys are always excited to choose their costumes. This mom’s soul seems in a completely different place than these little boys’ interests this Halloween, as the older ones seem to love the macabre type all of a sudden. They are thrilled with a crazy, blood covered, smiling, creepy thing or with Slender Man (all black bodysuit), or a swat guy.
The one I still got to choose is a hand me down costume I happened to have, a dinosaur. So, to just manage the holiday with 4 exuberant boys while I feel accomplished to just get up in the morning… Amazon and Costco, and last year’s leftovers. I didn’t even have to leave the house other than my normal grocery trip to get it done. I could handle that.
Me? Yes, I dressed up. I dressed as an angel. It seemed perfect to me. So I did it. I dressed all in white, with feathery wings. And, I expect a glow of the angels that still held me tightly in their arms day by day, my angels.
It’s not that I really think angels have wings. It’s symbolic of what wings mean. My wings that night would somehow free me from the reality of this day and I’d go trick or treating with my dead husband in matching angel costumes.
People passed me on the sidewalk and commented, “What a great costume.” “Thanks,” I would say, “I wanted to dress up in a costume that matches with Grants.” I would get a look of surprise, did she really say that? I got the looks of horror, pity, and uncertainty in knowing what to say in response as well. People would crinch their faces into a concerned and scared distortion for just a moment, then they’d smile and say, “Happy Halloween!” and scurry off.
People don’t like to talk about the reality of death, the inevitability of death, nor the shadows of death. An experience now touching every moment of my life with the reminder that he was here and now is gone. I live with it every day. Perhaps though I’m not playing macabre like my boys, but am living in it instead.
Death's reality is the silent companionship on lonely nights. Death leaves children in tears and sorrow. The extra work of doing the jobs of what 2 people once did together is death’s trick. The sound of silence where there once were so many conversations I didn’t know would ever end.
Everyone feels it, but doesn’t know how to interact with it. Sometimes I get the feeling people think they’ll catch death if they get too close to us. Halloween is the Holiday that commercializes the gruesomeness of death, the disturbing show of what’s inside only on the outside. It includes the insane, the crazy and the bizarrely unbelievable that we don’t dare even think, let alone face and absolutely never discuss as if discussion will bring it nearer.
Me, who when dressed like an angel, shows a closer reality to what death really looks like on the other side; yet, I create in others reactions; a real fear or uncomfortable uncertainty because of a truer reminder of what everyone knows is actual reality for all of us one day. The reminder that their day could be sooner rather than later like it was for my 38 year old husband.
I floated, as angels do, through the night in my own perception of flying with angels, my little angels. I went house to house with my children, gathering treats. I was isolated in my own world of my expression of grief through dress up. It felt good to me.
No one came to trick or treat with us this year, as happens with death, we were in it alone, but with each other. We celebrated commercialized death, while living deaths’ truth, getting candy treats as a prize.