Advent is just around the corner

So now was the Sunday of the dead and many will surely slowly begin to decorate their apartment for the Advent season and Christmas. I have a few thoughts that I would like to share with you.

It will be the first time I will celebrate this year without my father, the whole week of Advent or be my father and that will not be particularly beautiful because I associate many beautiful memories with my father and the Advent season.

Starting from delicious bratwurst eat at the Christmas market but not classic, but when he picked me up on Saturdays from the bus station in Castrop-Rauxel and we quickly went to the Christmas market to eat a bratwurst there before we drove home to ring in the weekend together with the family.

Or nice spontaneous walkers to the Recklinghäuser Christmas market where we just enjoyed the beautiful atmosphere maybe even listened to the music and looked at the beautifully decorated shop windows of the shops.

‘This is how we decorated the shared apartment together for Christmas’

I have to say that we also did this after my parents were divorced and everyone more or less went their own way so we also decorated the common apartment together for Christmas.

And it wasn't until years later, after I moved out to live with a friend, that we didn't decorate the apartment to his, but my father always sent me a picture of how beautiful he was.

Now you could say okay that he is dead, but you can be glad that you still have your sister and your mother and your nephew the big and the small as well as your brother-in-law yes, I still have them very gladly because they still circle my thoughts at the moment because my father is no longer with us and I have actually always enjoyed it very much to enjoy this time with him.

Last year when we were both not doing very well, because there were many changes and many innovations in our lives, we did much more together and sent us small photos via WhatsApp how beautiful something is and if it was just a tealight.

“Had I known it was the last year”

I can still remember how we were shopping together in the pre-Christmas period for Christmas Eve and then made us have a nice three days or a great continuous feast for both of us. This was of course really nice and I enjoyed this time very much, even if I had not tasted much this year, I was not so after. Had I known it was the last year we had it in common, the last Christmas. I would have tried a little harder, but we didn't feel like it.

This year my family are even more interested in me and I will also make a memory of my father as beautiful as I can, with the help of my sister and my mother I will make it beautiful for Christmas now, after the dead was Sunday and we are just before the first Advent. I think it's the right time and the right moment to decorate it.

I can't even think about how it will be when I sit with my mother or sister under the Christmas tree and love everyone around me and find that my father is missing or, rather, our father is missing.

Now that I'm writing these words, I have to fight hard with the tears and I have a thick lump in my throat. Actually, I thought that it would make me less sad to write about this topic but on the contrary.

Quality time

It's like, as an adult you don't even draw the gifts anymore, you are happy when you give something to the children and they are happy about it, but you don't need anything good about little things anymore, I can really be happy if, that's something beautiful, where the one has thought a lot of things but basically it's the time you can spend with the family or with the people who are important and dear. It is, as a modern thinker and poet once said, the ‘quality time’ that one should then use to make the most of it for oneself.

I will now use the time with my dear ones more intensively because I know on painful experience that the time together is ephemeral and we only have the memory left.

How do you deal with the loss of loved ones and the first Christmas?

Your Sasha

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