#SmileAdvent

It’s here. December. The countdown to Christmas really begins. My two sons are already bursting with excitement – ‘When are we getting the tree?’ ‘When can we decorate?’ ‘Santa’s taking ages!’ ‘Can we get our stockings out?’

There are three stockings … one will forever remain empty.

It’s my third Christmas without my little boy, Ned, who died in a car crash on Good Friday, 2016. It doesn’t feel real. How can it possibly be the third Christmas without him?

I remember, I feel, our last Christmas together like it was only yesterday. Tomi, always the first awake, asking if we could get up now and shooing him back to bed for a bit longer … giving in at 6am and telling him to go and wake Ned up. Giggling and running feet to our bedroom. Sitting on our bed opening their stockings whilst Ned told us about seeing Santa in the night, ‘… and he spoke to me.’

Tomi, ‘What did he say?’

Ned, ‘He said …’

Tomi, eyes wide, ‘What? What did he say?’

Ned, looking very serious, ‘Wait, Tomi … he said … hello Ned.’

Laughing.

Racing to the living room. Tomi, 8 years old, tearing open his presents in a frenzy of whoops and a swirling storm of wrapping paper. Cai, 15 months old, sitting on the rug watching his brothers in wonder. Ned, 4 years old, carefully opening each present, delighting in each one whilst Tomi (his presents all opened) hopped from foot to foot saying, ‘Open another one, Ned. Come on!’ My husband filming the scene. Me, sitting on the sofa, cradling a coffee, smiling a from the pit of my stomach smile, watching my three boys, my whole world, lost in the magic of Christmas.

I don’t remember the Christmas that followed. I have vague memories of last Christmas. I remember the quiet. I remember the empty stocking on Ned’s bed. I remember the empty space on the living room floor where Santa always left Ned’s presents. I remember the lost look in Tomi’s eyes as he opened his presents slowly. I remember the empty space at the table. I remember the emptiness.

There will forever be that empty space that was once filled with our beautiful, bouncing, boisterous little Ned. And yet time cruelly ticks on even though my head screams, ‘Wait. Stop. No more.’

But time doesn’t stop or slow down and so I face yet another Christmas. How can I get through it? How can I be happy and smiley for my two sons who truly deserve a happy Christmas? How can I feel Christmas again? I don’t know. I have no magic answer. The only certainty I have is that I have to try.

A few days ago I took my sons to choose their Advent Calendars after school, and we bought an Advent Candle for Ned.

Standing in the supermarket, watching Tomi explain to Cai that there’s a chocolate behind every little door and when he opens the last door it will be Christmas, I smiled. A smile I felt on the inside, not one of the ones I’ve become so good at pasting on my face. A smile that allowed me to be in that moment – no past, no future, just that exact moment in time.

It was later that night as I relived that precious moment (so simple and so forgettable for others) that I thought of a smile advent. One real smile every day leading up to Christmas. Could I do that? Could I find that one special moment every day?

It has given me a focus. I’ll search each day for that something that will make me smile; something that will allow me to simply exist in that precise moment in time. A smile that I’ll feel. And I’ll share my smile moments on Twitter because maybe my smile moment will make someone else smile. Maybe someone will share their smile moment from that day. And then maybe someone else will share their moment.

Grief is lonely and isolating. It is pain and anguish. It is tears and unbearable sadness. It is overwhelming and crushing.

Grief isn’t contagious but (and there is scientific research to prove this) smiling is.

Help to pass on a smile with my #SmileAdvent.