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Halloween is only two days away. It’s usually one of my favorite holidays, and has been since I was small, but this year I just can’t get in the spirit of things. I’m not sure why, but I feel almost melancholy. I haven’t wanted to decorate. We’re carving pumpkins tonight and I hope that gets me in a more ghoulish mood, but I’m not holding my breath.

Halloween is Samhain for my religion, Wicca. It is a festival to celebrate the dead. To say goodbye to them. Because our daughter, Trinity, still trick or treats we do a traditional American Halloween and do the Samhain ritual separately. It is supposed to be a joyous farewell, or in some cases, a happy reunion with the spirits of those we loved who have passed away. Samhain is seen as a time when the veil between this world and the next thins and allows us more clear communication both ways. Most Americans don’t realize that Halloween and all it’s traditions were not always fun and frolic. We happily carve pumpkins into scary faces, but most people don’t remember that we carve jack o lanterns with frightening faces and dress in scary costumes to scare away real scary things. The idea being that we can sort of bluff the real ghosts and monsters away by looking even scarier ourselves. But at it’s heart, it’s about saying goodbye to those we love and have lost, or making peace with an old loss.

For the first time in years I am working on my mother’s death. I am finally ready, healthy enough, whatever, to have her death as part of the Samhain ritual. She died when I was six, and her death that hot, August day, changed my life forever. Whoever I was supposed to be, whatever life I was supposed to live, was gone. Not only was I profoundly affected but I was then raised by her mother, my grandmother, just the two of us and that was a very different upbringing than I think my mother had in mind. The last movie I remember her taking me to was “Bambi”. Back before video or movies on demand Disney would re-release moves periodically. This was one such for “Bambi”. I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows the movie’s plot, if you’ve somehow missed it, then please stop reading, because I’m about to spoil one of the big moments of the film. (Waits for those who have been living under a rock for the last three decades to live the room.) Okay, Bambi’s mother dies in the film. Curse you, Disney, and your penchant for killing off perfectly good parents. Admittedly, Bambi the book has the same plot, and if you haven’t read it I recommend it. It’s a good read. I sat in the theater and wept while my mother held me, comforting me because the cartoon deer’s mother gets shot by hunters. Later that year, I’d been weeping for real, mourning her.

I bought a mug in Disney World the last time we went. It’s a Christmas mug from 2007 one of Disney’s Christmas Through the Years series. It’s a Bambi mug with all the animals from the movie decorating a tree in the snowy forest. Bambi is standing beside the Great Stag (his father) and gazing up at his mother who is helping the birds string red ribbon. I found this mug both charming and painful when I bought it, but I thought I was ready for it. I was not. I have never used it. It has sat in my cabinet of mugs since 2007. I shoved it into the back of the cupboard where I didn’t even have to look at it. Just in the last couple of weeks I found it again, and this time I got it out. I am drinking my morning tea from it as I type this, and it does remind me of my mother. It does remind me of the irony of her comforting me over the fictional death of a cartoon mother, when only months later she’d be dead for real, and she wouldn’t be there to comfort me when I needed her most. Yes, yes, the irony of that last statement does not escape me. I wanted her back with me to help me deal with her death. I wanted her back so badly that it was like a physical ache from the top of my head to the tips of toes. The idea that she’d never come through the door again, never hug me again, never do her exercises while I tried to follow along, was almost more than I could bear. I was six and didn’t have a lot of coping skills for a disaster that large. My grandmother’s grief at losing her baby girl, my mother, was so overwhelming that it was more important than mine. She would mourn my mother’s loss for the rest of her life, and all of my childhood. I would be in my twenties before I began therapy to work through that first profound grief. I have worked the issues that stem from all of it, but I haven’t let myself say goodbye with love and not just not pain. It has been too painful, too much to bear, and I am decades from that little girl, but still I miss my mother. It sounds almost silly. My own daughter is a teenager. I am married and very grownup. I am a successful novelist, a New York Times Bestseller, but still I miss my mother.

I believe that this Samhain I will finally be able to welcome her memory with love and acceptance of the loss. I think, maybe, I’m ready to say goodbye. I guess this does explain why I just can’t seem to get into the mood of the more commercial American Halloween. I’m not in the mood to dress up as a hooker Pirate this year, or much of anything else. This year for Halloween being myself will be quite enough. I don’t feel the need to scare the ghosts away this year, its time to welcome them in, and say goodbye.