another christmas

another season seems to have passed us by. we hung our stockings  laid our stocking by the wall with care; the children were tucked in their sleeping bags; our yuletide joy will be boxed up in their rubbermade containers for another year. christmas it seems, has yet again come and gone.

i will admit, christmas will never be the same. but christmas this year, was the start of new traditions and marked a turning point in my family's lives.

last year, dads passing was still so fresh in our minds. it had only been 24 days since he died and christmas just wasn't what it should have been. i'm not saying that the reason for christmas was lost on us. no, i'm not saying that at all. it's just, nothing was how it should have been last year. my mom and i flew to gatineau last year to be with my very pregnant sister, and my other sister and her husband were spending christmas with his folks in ontario. christmas day rolled around, my sister was so sick (and so pregnant), my youngest nephew could only eat berries and gelato, and i slept on a camping cot in the fabric/sewing room. for christmas dinner we had surprise spread (a delicious dipping spread with cocktail sauce, shrimp, tomatoes and peppers), and our boxing day dinner was salmon. who has dip and salmon at christmas? and not to mention the fact that the whole family wasn't there. last year was just not christmas.

this year was full of our old traditions. there were 13 of us this year at our house (including the japanese and korean girls that live with us). we had our corn chowder on christmas eve (dad made the best, but mom did a satisfactory attempt this year). my older sister read the other wise man (which was made more entertaining this year by the giggles of my nephews at the mention of the word 'naked'). we all got our traditional christmas eve pajamas (courtesy of santa, the christmas spirit, and donalbain and andrew). we all got up at 9am to open stockings, have breakfast and then dive into the hours of present opening. christmas this year was happy and joyful. we were together as a family, which is how christmas should be.

i am very thankful for many things in my life, but my family is one of the things that i treasure more than anything else. my dad gave me a verse when i graduated. it was colossians 1:9-14. my favourite part of this verse is when it says that through gods great power, we will have the strength to bare anything joyfully. this christmas was joyful. eventhough he wasn't here, as a family, we were able to find the joy in each other and being in each others company.

i have a great family. i miss my dad, especially this time of year, but we managed to have a christmas full of laugher, christmas cheer and love. last christmas was a christmas to forget, but this christmas showed me that our family is strong and that we will be able to bare anything joyfully.

Nadia

oh my, where has the time gone? it has been, oh quite a while since i last blogged about my ventures in the funeral world. i have found that this has been a very helpful venue for me to vent about my very dreary classes and my wonderful (yes, wonderful) experiences in the funeral home thus far. i've shared with you my heart about my dad and his life. now i want to share with you, Nadia!

i didn't know Nadia very long or very well for that matter. but what i did know about her was that she was the kind of spirit that would light up the room whenever she entered it. she was the kind of girl that you wanted to get to know, simply so you could say that she was your friend.

Nadia was 21 years old and full of life. no one expected what happened and still when i think about it, it makes me shake my head to know that something could have been done to prevent it.

about a month ago, Nadia was having some pains in her back. no big deal, right? after a few days of the pain persisting and intensifying, she went to the walk-in clinic and was told to take some tylenol (a walk-in docs miracle tonic for all things that ail you). from what i know, Nadia was a little bit of a worry-wart, but still she just thought it was a bad case of lumbago. a few days later, with back pains so intense that she couldn't breathe, her sister finally took her to the hospital (keep in mind that she thought she had a sore back).

within a few days, Nadia was on a ventilator and her sister was told that she possibly wouldn't make it through the night! all this from a sore back! it turns out that Nadia had developed a staff infection in her knee and it had spread rapidly through her blood into her organs and her heart was now working on just one valve (our heart has 4 valves and 4 chambers... Nadia just had one valve working)!

Nadia was in the hospital for about 3 weeks in the ICU. she was on a ventilator and heavily sedated so that she wouldn't pull out the tube that was breathing for her. she was somewhat responsive but it just seemed that she was stable, not getting better. the doctors finally discovered that one of the reasons that the staff infection got to the point that it was at was because her blood never produced any white blood cells to fight off the infection which is why she never even really knew that she was sick. when we get sick with an infection, our bodies produce WBC to attack the infections. Nadia's never did. she never knew she was sick. for weeks, her body was being attacked by this infection with no way to fight it off.

during the last week, Nadia's kidneys failed, her heart was barely working and her brain started to bleed. it's hard to imagine that this all started with a pain in her back.

Nadia died december 14th, 2009.

i work with Nadia's sister. when we talked about Nadia in the week before she died, all she could do was hope. she said that she had to have hope that she would recover, but that if she was going to die, she didn't want to have hope at all. hope can be a curse and a blessing, she said. i guess to some degree i agree. but at the same time, if i loose hope then i'm doomed to a life dominated by doubt. even if things don't work the way i believe they will, i can't loose hope. i definitely can't loose my hope and faith in God, no matter how many times things don't turn out the way i plan or pray they do.

when i talked to Nadia's sister, it was all she could do not to cry.

"there is a sacredness in tears. they are not the mark of weakness, but of power. they speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. they are messengers of overwhelming grief... and unspeakable love" ~ washington irving

4:33am

it's 12:20am as i start this post. so many things have happened in the last year, some of which i forgot right after they happened, others i won't be able to forget for the rest of my life.

1 year, 4 hours and 13 minutes ago, my dad took his last breathe. standing there next to him as his life literally ended. i remember thinking that it couldn't have really happened. i remember feeling my heart physically breaking. i remember going out to find the nurse to tell her that he was gone. to tell her that my dad was dead.

it was just so unreal. at 8pm he was talking to us, telling us how much he loved us. telling us that he had never once felt abandoned by God. telling us that he had no regrets about his life. no regrets other than 2: the first regret was that he was never going to see his grandchildren grow up. the second was that he was never going to be there to walk me down the aisle. i was lying there on his bed beside him as he looked up at me, with this look like he had somehow let me down.

it was at 4:33am that my dad took his last breathe. it was at 4:33am that i had to say goodbye to my daddy. it was at 4:33am that my life changed. how do you adjust to life without the man who means more to you than anything else it the world? i've been asking myself that for the past year. i mean, how do you get used to something like that? how do you get used to the idea that your dad is dead? all i know is that i will never get used to it.

i love you daddy and i miss you more than the world!