Reading, Blue Christmas, and Dolly

I have been reading about suicide.   I have a list of books on the sidebar.    It has been helpful as I have read from those who have lost loved ones from suicide and the unique grief that accompanies this devastation.  Mental illness is devastating.   Christ, why couldn't he talk to us?   Maybe he did and we didn't hear.   I am learning about psychic pain.   I'll never know it though.  I will never know it as he felt it.   It is devastation, both his pain and our grief.   Now his pain is ours.  It isn't the same kind of pain, though.  He couldn't talk about it.  I can.  Some days, however, I just sit.  Now and then I catch myself staring mindlessly.  

It isn't that I spend each day in a fetal position.  I get things done.   I smile and I laugh.  My life isn't over.   I still have things to do and things still have meaning, although the things that were at one point important to me are less so now.  Nothing is quite so important except for my beloveds.

I haven't been posting much.   I have been setting up this blog and my other website.   I have some catching up to do.  Also, we have been away on adventures over the past six weeks.  I am going to post some pictures from planting the tree at Holston Camp in his memory and from Daughter's half-marathon that she and her aunties and uncle and friends ran in Zach's honor in Nashville.   I have pictures of pictures that I gleaned from my mother's photo albums when I was in Montana. 

Now we are home for a while.

We put up the tree.  Blue Christmas.  Lovely placed blue lights around the house, blue lights on the tree, and blue stockings on the wall as if they are walking down the stairs from the loft to the main floor.

We are Elvis.

I have held a "Tidings of Comfort" service for the past several years around the week before Christmas.   I have called it informally the "Blue Christmas" service.   This will be the first time that I am a "client" as opposed to a "provider."  Gack.

We spent Thanksgiving in Pigeon Forge.   Locals know what that is about.  We had Thanksgiving Dinner at Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede.    

"Y'all don't be fussin' and fightin' this Christmas," 

says Dolly from a big screen over the arena.  1200 people eat at once with their bare hands while the entertainers do tricks on horses and others clown around.   The baby Jesus and all your manger favorites visit from a platform that drops from the ceiling.  I swear Joseph looked like Ozzie Osborne.

Now get this.  This other guy and I were selected from 1200 people to come down into the arena and pitch "hillbilly horseshoes" (toilet seats).   I pitched for my team, the South Pole.   My opponent pitched for the North Pole.

I won.

I received a medal.

This is a true story.

My Lovelies howled.

Zach would have as well.