This is going to be a rather odd narrative for the holiday season. Especially considering that along with Hanukkah and Christmas, we will now be celebrating Three Kings Day.  Our very first celebration. Although, we actually celebrated this by mistake when we were in Greece in January, many years ago.  We were meant to  celebrate this more often.   And this coming January, we are going all out. My son is very lucky and rather exhuberant.   But it is not irrational exhuberance. Oh political humor.

However, let me not digress too far from my original discussion topic. But, considering that I have yet to touch it, I suppose I could just digress completely without it really being a digression.

As of late, I have been advising myself that it is ok to mourn. It is a rather odd thing but as we get older it seems that we can mourn more readily. For me that seemed counterintuitive. I suppose it is not.  I mean, as we get older, we will have confronted death more often than when we were younger. But when we were younger, you would think we would easily mourn as it was newer and one could be free in grief.

Yet, years ago, I experienced the death of someone close to me and I couldn’t cry. I worked hard, instead. I planned andplanned and executed said plans.  Then a few years after, my mother died. I cried but I was in shock. Thus, I didn’t cry-cry.  Then my beloved dog. I was sick with grief. But held in most of my tears after the first day.  Then a colleague died and I cried horribly in public. That was the beginning of my mourning.

Now, I feel like I am moruning many people and even things. Some may say I am mourning life stages and turns. A week and a half ago, I found myself telling myself that it was ok to grieve.  Then, I cried and cried for ten minutes and it felt good. I was mourning many things at once. And, it did feel ok to do. I gave myself permission and now I don’t need anyone else’s permission. Not that I needed anybody else’s permission to mourn. I think I had needed my own permission and had been loathe to give it for some unexplicable reason.

Now that we are in a social media and digital time, mourning may have changed a bit. I don’t study the process of mourning and don’t know what the academic literature has to say on it at this point.   But I am not here to sound academic. I am being personal as mourning is all personal and contextual. But I do see many more public displays of mourning now through Facebook and Twitter. I now, also, know of many more people who pass as friends of friends post such passings on social media.   On Twitter now, I often weigh in with an RIP tweet if a celebrity I loved or that my mom loved passed. When Prince passed away, I could not wait to get onto Twitter to express my sadness at his untimely death. The same with Robin William’s suicide. I was shocked by it and needed to put something out there in writing.

Oddly, considering my Tweets, when my mother passed away, I didn’t announce it on Facebook.  Many of my friends didn’t know till a few years later that she had passed. I kept my grief and my mourning within me. I’m ok with that as well.  Writing about her death didn’t come till way later. This past year, I have written of it often. I finally can start truly processing it.

Now, I am ok with mourning. Its hard. Heartbreaking. Depression-inducing. But there is another side to get to in that spectrum of emotions. So, as we are in a much joyous holiday season, I am also processing sadness and grief at how a number of things have passed. And that is ok.  I am not saddened by my sadness. I also know that come the morning of December 25th, the smiles, giggles and extreme happiness that my son will be experiencing will take me to a higher plane of my own happiness. I am happy with what I have and there is much to celebrate this hokiday season as the year comes to an end.  With that, I go to sleep with a smile on my face. I think. Or it could be allergies.