Palm Springs Christmas

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably realize that Christmas Eve was the one-year anniversary of Dennis's death. I had decided some time ago that it would probably be in my best interest to get out of town instead of being home alone at that time. It was definitely the correct decision.

I stayed in Cathedral City (right next door to Palm Springs) with my old friend Des. He picked me up at the airport Friday night, we visited until a bit after midnight, then went to bed. Saturday morning, we went over to Donna's house for breakfast with her and Joshua. She made a quiche in honor of Dennis, as he always made the best quiches. After we ate, we made mimosas and toasted him, then the four of us watched the DVD that Doug had made for me from the Celebration of Life party back in January. Donna, Des and I had already seen it; Joshua had not seen it. It brought out many tears on my part, and a sniffle or two from everyone else. But after that big cry, I was fine the rest of the weekend. I was able to talk about Dennis without breaking down; I was able to enjoy the parties (yes, parties as in plural). Des had a party Christmas Eve for about 35-40 people. It was a lot of fun. One of the things he does is issues name tags to everyone to make it easier to start a conversation with others. I'm assuming because I was the new face in the room, it seemed that everyone came up to me and just started talking. At 7:45pm, I was in a small group of people and I asked them to indulge me for a moment; then I told them about Dennis passing away at 7:45pm the previous Christmas Eve and I wanted to toast him. Even though I was with strangers, they toasted along with me without hesitation, plus they all expressed their condolences. I did that with about three different groups of people throughout the evening once 7:45pm had passed by.

I was kept pretty busy on Christmas day too, as we attended two separate open house parties. They were only a few blocks from Des's house and the two parties were right next door to each other, so we went to the first and only had to walk next door to attend the second one. I ended up meeting a lot of Des's friends over the weekend including some of the people that had attended his party, so it was kind of cool seeing the same people a couple of days in a row.

Once the parties were over, we just hung around the house, went out to dinner a couple of times and I really enjoyed myself the entire weekend. It made the one-year anniversary much easier to take. And even though I know that the one-year anniversary was symbolic, I have already noticed a slight change in how I feel. I'm hoping that 2012 will be a better year as not only did 2011 represent my first year of being without Dennis, I also lost my Mom in September, so essentially I lost the two most important people in my life within one year's time. I had a lot of grief to process in 2011 and I'm still processing. The one thing I learned in therapy is that you never get over it, you learn to live with it—which is what I'm doing, though I certainly don't like it one bit.