Anticipatory Grief is the Spookiest Part of this Season
Halloween is under a week away and I am finally acknowledging that things are so different now than they used to be. It doesn’t feel the same, and we’ve needed to make a lot of changes to how we celebrate to come close to resembling past holidays.
In past years, we could barely wait until Oct 1st before putting up our Halloween decorations. We’d go to the pumpkin patch together and pick out pumpkins. We’d “Boo” our neighbors and come up with clever costumes to then trick or treat together.
This year... Soraya was not up for going to the pumpkin patch, and we had to get creative with FaceTime so she could still be included. She wasn’t excited about “Boo-ing” the neighbors, which made Yasmeen and Leena not want to either. Soraya also announced she is too tired to go trick or treating. This wasn’t entirely surprising—last year she went by sitting in one spot in her wheelchair and our neighbors came to her with candy—but it hurts to hear that she knows she’s too tired to go at all this year.
Again, we’re getting creative to find solutions. Soraya hopes to have Safi take a picture of her in her costume, and then he’ll walk around the neighborhood with her picture on his phone and trick-or-treat in her place. She’ll wait at home and hand out candy with me and rest.
It’s hard. The change in how we do things to accommodate her fatigue while still including her is a constant reminder of the loss we experience.
We almost didn’t put up our decorations. As I described the sadness of all the loss, Safi popped up and set up everything this week. It may not look or feel like old times, but here’s to constantly meeting our children where they are and finding new ways to celebrate old traditions.