I'm currently "home" for the holidays with my family. This trip is emotionally easier than the last one, though I don't know why. In the days before Thanksgiving, I felt terribly depressed being in the house where we lived when my father disappeared one night, never to return. It jolted me back to the time when I was a young bright-eyed English major, living in this house with my raggedy old car and my nose in a book most of the time, and when all that innocence was taken away. (Innocence... *snort*) So it was a hard trip, though it improved towards the end.

This time around, I have been here for about two days and I am feeling good. Is it Christmas? Christmas was always my favorite holiday as a child - I simply loved it - but since the accident, when everything changed, I had a hard time enjoying it again. I went through the motions for the kids in my family but it was lost to me.

Now, the first year that we are having Christmas without my father, I am enjoying it again. That is startling. Is it because I have been able to breathe a sigh of relaxation, knowing he is not alone in a room, suffering in agony, wondering where his life went terribly wrong? Do I believe in heaven subconsciously and just not know it? I miss him, and I wish with all my heart I could see him on Christmas Day like we did last year, but something has changed, and maybe that something is what will get me through the grief of his passing.