No wrapping this up

I've been mindlessly watching Christmas movies. Within the first 10 minutes you know how the whole thing is going to work out. Extra points given if someone moves to an extra Christmassy small town, owns a bakery, or a tree farm!

Another feature of most of them is that in the beginning someone has died. Most often it is a mother, and occasionally it is a friend or even a spouse. It is never a child.

The death has caused our main character character to be stuck in a malaise that keeps the magic of Christmas from reaching their heart. Then something magical happens, usually by way of a new love interest, and they learn how to be happy again.

These Christmas movies make it all look so simple. Someone faces their grief, and somehow the pieces of their life fall back into place. I am satisfied when all the loose ends are wrapped up AND my movie does not look like this. 

Jess loved Christmas. I love Christmas, and it looms like some awful bully ready to mock me. I want, quite desperately, to go through our ornament boxes and recall every little whisp of a memory about Jess hanging them on our tree BUT then they will hang there taunting me, with the knowledge that she wasn’t there to hang them, or tell me the stories about her favorites.

The idea of joy feels like a cruel joke. I don’t have a plan, I don’t have a path forward. I just have this emptiness, this unbearable weight of knowing she won’t be here to laugh, to tell her stories, or to hang her favorite ornaments.

In the movies, the characters find a way to "move on," as if grief is a journey with a clear destination, a place where everything feels tidy and whole. Somehow this is the agreed upon, acceptable way, to wrap things up. 

I do not want to wrap things up. I don't ever want to move Jess to the past. This Christmas she is almost still here, and the thought of facing a future without her feels impossible. 

There is no map for this, no script to follow.

And maybe there isn’t supposed to be a story about how to make this easier, no movie arc to guide me through it. Maybe it’s okay to let the grief just sit, as it is, and to admit that I don’t know what comes next. 

Right now, all I know is that I miss her. And maybe, for now, that’s enough.