I had planned to blog in the days leading up to Easter, but the combination of allergies, a mania for tidying my attic, the arrival of a large load of comic books and sudden access to all the Marvel superhero movies on Disney+ has left me focused on things other than my writing. That said, I’m making amazing progress through the Marvel movies and it’s possible I have the tidiest attic in Germany.
It’s something, I guess, but still not what I really want.
I’ve been dreading the arrival of Easter for a while. My family certainly had an Easter celebration when I was a child. I remember enjoying Easter. But then my brothers moved out of the house and I got older and we weren’t that religious and, honestly, from my mid-teens until I had children in my 30s, Easters would come and go and I would have no idea that it was the Easter season at all or that I had missed it.
That, of course, changed when the kids showed up. But it was still always a distant second place to Christmas in my mind. And then, in 2016, we had to send Emma and Noah away to their grandparents because of Colin’s initial cancer diagnosis, meaning Christina, Colin and I had our Easter in the hospital. Last year we had it at home during those two short months between rehab and the hospice, but it was a stressful affair, like everything else back then. I was trying to keep count as April started, but I can’t do it from my memory any more. All I know is that, two weeks into April 2019, we had probably seen about five nurses quit on us. I know we were without a nurse during the day on Easter Sunday and I know that I ended up eating Easter dinner with Emin, the nurse, late Sunday because there had been no way to keep Colin distracted while everyone else had dinner without me being upstairs with him. I know we still had hope last year at Easter, but it was so exhausting.
And now we’ve got this Easter, in the middle of a lockdown that shows no signs of ending. And, so long as I’ve got comic book-based movies to download, I’ll be fine, but it’s just another strike against the day in my book. Because, no matter what, Easter is know forever bound up with Colin and cancer for me. But it’s even worse than that. I hate that part of our Easter tradition will now be going to his grave and I hate the fact that my children, who literally watched their brother die a half year ago, are now having to spend their time worrying about this coronavirus. They don’t act scared. Maybe they’re not consciously scared. But they ask questions about my cholesterol and my pulmonary embolism and I can’t help but think they’re trying to figure out if I have a pre-existing condition and how vulnerable i am. Noah said last night that he hopes the lockdown doesn’t stop him from getting the second shot for his HPV vaccination because he doesn’t “want to die from cancer.”
It’s too much to take in sometimes, what these kids have to work through. So, we had as nice an Easter as we could have. But I’m afraid it’s never going to genuinely be a nice holiday for me.