Ghost of Christmas Past

I think this is going to be a hard Christmas.

It will be the first Christmas morning that I haven't woken up next to Rosemarie in 34 years.

She was always the most enthusiastic about Christmas - eager to get the tree up and decorated, loving shopping for presents, and delighting in the cooking and the family rituals.

There is a big hole in Christmas this year. I have almost no Christmas spirit and very little enthusiasm for finding any. I wrote cards and bought some presents but my heart is not in it and I feel like I am going through the motions.

Over the past few Christmases as the disease progressed she could do less and less and I took over the preparation of the meal and organising everything, but she was always there, even when she needed feeding, couldn't open her presents herself and didn't really understand what was going on.

I will see her Christmas Day of course. The care home are happy for residents' families to share Christmas Dinner and my son and I will be going (my daughter is married and now hosts the Family Christmas). I don't know what the food will be like - I don't really care - but it seems the only place to be.

I am not sure how much (or how consistently) she understands what is going on. The care home is decorated and there are quite a lot of Christmas carols on the radio, There was a Christmas Fair a few weeks ago where many of the staff dressed up in Santa clothes and there was a Christmas sing song. She found this very entertaining and attempted to sing along, but I have no idea if she made the connection to Christmas. 

I am not sure how much to talk about it. On the one hand, it is happening and there is evidence of it all around her; I don't know how many of her attempts to communicate are related to it. On the other hand, I am worried that the more I go on about it the more upset she will feel as she realises she will be spending Christmas there. I agonised over whether to decorate her room. I did in the end, but she has hardly noticed.

Christmas has somehow lost all its colour. Whatever happens it will look and feel different from every other Christmas I have experienced. For example, the whole issue of buying Rosemarie a present: what to do? I used to buy her jewellery, but she would not recognise it and cannot wear it (the care home discourages it: they maintain that we should not bring in anything we would not be prepared to be broken or lost). The same logic applies to ornaments. Books are pointless, she can't play games, she barely watches the DVDs she has, and any kind of gadget (for instance a tablet) would be totally beyond her. 

So it comes down to clothes. I have bought her some pretty tops but I know in my heart that I might as well have bought plain t shirts. She never shows any awareness of what she is wearing and seems to take no joy in it (and she used to love her clothes so much). The care workers sometimes comment on how nice she looks but there is only a flash of awareness from her if that: I think she just responds to someone talking to her. 

So everything has changed. My children are wonderful and friends are very supportive, but nothing really changes the brutal facts. This Christmas Eve will not be the traditional bustle and excitement. Christmas morning I will wake alone. Christmas Dinner will be a faint echo of what it used to be. And whenever I leave the care home to go to my daughter's house I will feel guilty I haven't stayed long enough.

And I will be going to a house full of happy laughing people enjoying Christmas and asking me how Rosemarie is.