Hi Babe,
I miss you. I miss you so much. Everyone knows the holidays are going to be harder, but I have been pondering on why that is lately. I know for many it is the most amount of family activities they will do all year, and in the shortest amount of time. Holidays are intense. But it’s also a question of presence- how mindful are we throughout the rest of the year that this sprint becomes embedded in our subconsciousness so easily? You and I made beautiful holiday memories together. Our Christmases were warmer, cozier, and more loving than any that came before…we never made it to the ice rink downtown.
I put up the tree but I can’t bring myself to put the ornaments on. It was hard enough putting up the Christmas village. The last time any of these decorations saw the light of day, you were looking at them alongside me.
And then there is the Judaism thing. A lot of my classmates are still decorating for Christmas. I have a hard time reconciling the mixture of the two holidays, but I can get onboard with decorating with the evergreens and holly in celebration of the winter solstice. That’s what you wanted, anyway, when I used to talk to you about this dilemma. Great excuse for avoiding ornaments that came from your family and my family and exchanges with friends. Back when you were here to share things with.
We had to write spiritual autobiographies in class, this past week. We spent the class commenting on the ones within our group and asking questions. Mine started with the beginning and ended with you. One of the rabbis had asked me if I had ever considered religion, before. To which I replied “no, except when I was 14 and my Dad had died and I was a born-again Christian for all of two seconds.” He commented on how so many people find religion after death, and to be true, I am leaning into the theology in some ways now more than ever, because I need there to be something. Just something. I need to know you are happy or at peace, wherever you are, whatever you are. That you are happy now. That being said, I found out about my Jewish ancestry two years before you died, and you were right there with me, teaching me more about the old testament or Hebrew bible (depending on who you’re talking to) than I ever would have expected. For someone as staunchly atheist as you, you sure absorbed that Irish Catholic upbringing.
The Jewish faith is so different than what I thought it was, though. It doesn’t feel like religion in the traditional sense. There is a lot of ritual involved, yes, but the concepts, theories, and approach to how one considers a higher power and what that higher power actually is, who we are actually talking about when we talk about G-d, are so very different than any organized religion I have experience with. Which, to be fair, isn’t many, but if you add that to the fact that Judaism is one of the very few ethno-religions and that it even has the ability to show up on a DNA test, I feel good about saying this isn’t where I started, but it is where I’ll end. I always wonder how this would have affected our relationship moving forward. Would you have accepted my ideas around G-d not being a big man in the sky but instead existing in the power of the universe (something described in the Torah)? Would that have been loose enough terms for you? I know you would have kept celebrating holidays with me, either way, because you loved and supported me. You believed in me. Maybe too much. When I think about the reasons you should have stayed, I think about your life, and all the things you couldn’t see in your clouded state, and then I think if none of that was enough, and you weren’t going to stay for yourself, I wish you had thought you needed to stay for me. That I couldn’t do this without you, that I needed you. That I couldn’t go through losing you and grieving you without the love you gave me when you were alive. That sentiment is the whole reason I write to you like this.
Speaking of ghosts, I just learned about quantum entanglement. Then it took me a few youtube videos and a physicist explaining it to me to wrap my head around, but I think I’ve got the gist, now…it’s been proven that if we exist here, there is another one of us that exists somewhere else. It has something to do with superposition and which way an atom is spinning…Einstein called it “spooky physics” and he didnt like it because it disproved his theory of relativity or something like that, but anyway, this gives me something to cling to. That I’ll see you again, someday. I thought I coined this idea, but I learned in my deep dive into quantum entanglement that it has in fact been said before by someone else. im paraphrasing here, but “everything was magic until we science’d it out.”
Hugo was up most of the night and vomited all over the bed…I would think he had a foreign body but he hasn’t done it again today and even though he hasnt eaten his food, he did eat a lot of cheese out of my hand. Your mom brought up the idea that maybe he’s grieving…I just want him to feel better.
Every cup of cocoa reminds me of you. You loved cocoa.
And I love you.