It’s Christmas day in Melbourne, and also Chris’s 35th birthday. We’re all getting older slowly but surely, but at least we will be getting old and wrinkly together.
That’s the thing about Christmases, birthdays, and every significant day of every year forever; time is moving on, wrinkles are slowly developing, hair is greying, and health will gradually decline. Every year, Chris exceeds another year that Ed lived, and I gradually get closer to the last year that Ed lived.
Every December throughout the month, I have small day dreams of what life could have been like if Ed were healthy and happy, if we could spend Christmas together with Chris and his family. He wouldn’t have been deprived of his favorite holiday, he’d have a Christmas tree to decorate and admire as the lights flickered, and he’d get excited about all the delicious varieties of food on the Jacob family table.
And every December, I get angry thinking about everything my parents robbed my brother of, the unconditional love and parental support he never got to experience. And it makes me feel pain and anguish. Ed was just like every other simple child until he realized that he was never going to have good role models to look up to, and then he just decided to stop caring. Why should he care when he didn’t feel like he was cared for?
Christmas is supposed to be a happy time, a happy day. But it’s always marred for me because it was Ed’s favorite holiday, and he’ll never get to see it again.
I still think about visiting a medium to speak with him directly. It sounds ridiculous, but I think I will always be angry that he was taken away so soon. There’s too much left unsaid and undone.