Our last Christmas together, I threw everything at making Advent, as well as Christmas itself, feel special.
I didn’t know it would be his last Christmas. Except perhaps I did, without voicing it, not even to myself. Usually we went to France for Christmas, to stay with family. We did this every single year, apart from the last-minute cancellation the year of his diagnosis. But he was becoming too ill to travel, so for the first time we were planning a Christmas at home.
It seems odd looking back that this felt like a big thing – compared to my first Christmas without him, or the two pandemic years I spent it entirely alone. But with our only reference to a festive season at home being those days spent under the shock of a cancer diagnosis waiting for an appointment with a surgeon, perhaps my lack of confidence in making it joyful made sense.
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