About Christmas

It is a good thing that society, especially the social media society, has become more aware and sensitive that there are many out here who have a lot of heavy baggage to carry at Christmas time. Some of us have fresh things, in particular that missing person or persons who last Christmas was still touchable. It is so profound to attempt to understand that empty space, the one that isn’t truly empty but is a memory — a memorial.

Some of us may have gotten a divorce or gone through a break-up, another loss that can feel like death. Or lost a job, left unable to buy the things for children that we want. Become ill, ourselves, making us wonder if this will be our last Christmas, if next year we will be replaced by their memory of us.

There are many things that may happen over the course of a year that slices through the forced merry to make us bleed as we sit among the shiny red things.

Then there are those of us who are left out of the knowing about Christmas all together.

We never had this thing so our whole lives are spent either running from that loss or trying to create something that cannot be created or re-created. It cannot be created because once we leave childhood, Christmas is truly only nostalgia and an attempt to raise our hand into the air and grab some magic back. We tighten our fist around it when we think we have it. But really, what we have done is captured nostalgia again.

Running from it probably means doing something considered non-traditional. Maybe it means spending time with a chosen family. Whatever it means, it’s not unhealthy in the way we typically think of someone running away from their pain.

In this case, pretty much anything we do that keeps our emotional state somewhere above the Marianas Trench is what I would consider to be a healthy way of dealing with Christmas.

For me, there have been so many things that happened on this holiday — I have felt uncomfortable telling people about it. (Like, this is where you imagine a therapist doesn’t get paid enough for your shit.) When I have written about some of these experiences in the past, fictionalized the experiences, it has been clear that the truth is indeed often too heavy-handed for fiction.

Before I chronicle my ghosts of Christmas past, I feel I need to be upfront with the caveat that of course I had sweet and innocent and magical Christmas times as a child. And, some special ones as an adult as well.

But unfortunately when our world spends the kind of capital it does on meaning-making as it does with Christmas, it is the scars and the absences that become loud and painful. If you have seen Disney’s Inside Out, you’ll know it as a memory being forever changed when touched by Sadness. That is Christmas.

It only takes one touch for the memory — which is inseparable to the new event in the case of Christmas — is forever tinged with blue.

Yet as we also know, those blue memories help us to understand who we are, they inform us as to what we want in the present and future, and they serve as the contrast that makes our joy sink deeper into us each time it becomes the loud thing. All may not be bright, but all is not dark, either.

One of my first Christmas memories is a fragment of the magic. A feeling, a sense.

It happened before my mother married my stepfather.

A man who left no magic untainted.

He came into my world when I was five-years old. I’m fairly certain the above photo is within the first year of his arrival. He was a Marine, an Officer, but he was everything other than what I have come to know as the qualities most possess. I’m sure there are others like him, but in my years of living on base and knowing my friend’s fathers (including one of my heroes General Anthony Zinni) and in my adult years working with veterans who are either Officers or who have told me stories about the ones they admired, I think I am safe to say he was not typical.

I wrote about growing up with him.

It was around the time of this Christmas parade that he threw a glass of milk at my mother’s head while we were sitting at the dinner table. It cut her and she needed stitches. The milk and blood, together, is seared into my memory. There are times when a glass of milk can trigger my PTSD.

The next traumatic Christmas was a few years later. I was sick. Like the kind of kid sick that you just know as an adult you would have crawled to the hospital over. But as kids, we are tougher than that. This sickness involved my stomach, and the emptying of it over and over and over. Not sure how many days it had gone on, but I know by the time Christmas Day arrived I was weakened from the violence of it.

But if you are a sociopathic step-father, I suppose that is not enough for a ruined Christmas. He decided to start taking my picture every time I vomited. He laughed at me begging him to stop. Really. Yes.

And yes, that is a cigarette on the table and I am indeed puking into a Norman Rockwell trash can. I go big.

Then, there was the Christmas which changed everything.

My mother was pregnant and we had moved to Louisiana where my step-father was stationed. I was in the second grade, attending St Leo Catholic school and thinking an awful lot about Shaun Cassidy. Christmas was coming fast, and my mother went into labor. My brother, Rusty, was born and the whole world fell apart. He was born with an open-spine, completely exposed. He was paralyzed from the neck-down. Chances of survival only slightly increased if life-long hospitalization was acceptable.

I have very clear memories of Rusty. I can still see his back. His face. I can still, if I try hard enough, recall the way the room smelled when he was in it.

My short story, Angels, came out of this time in my life.

It wasn’t until a few years after I wrote the story (and was told in a workshop that something needed to happen for gods sakes) that I found this piece of paper and realized how deep into my subconscious I had plumbed.

I was sent to be with my cousins in North Carolina. I travelled by train, and actually fell in love with trains then, too. Hey Amtrak, you totally should have given me one of those residencies. But I digress.

I knew this when I wrote Angels, that I had taken the long train ride from New Orleans to North Carolina, but I have no memory of flying home by myself. Yet when I found this note, when I held it, I teared up for this little 8 yr old girl because in that instant I felt all the emotions I had assigned to the little girl in my story.

I did have a good Christmas with my cousins in North Carolina. It was like a real Christmas, and taken out of context it was one of my best ones. But it cannot be taken out of context, and the truth is my baby brother was miles away and he was dying. And with him, so much of my mother was dying, too.

Rusty passed quietly and peacefully as he was held by my mother — as the world was anticipating and celebrating a new year to come. For the rest of the New Year’s Eves to come in our house, it was about the loss of Rusty.

It would be decades before we would know what most likely caused such immeasurable pain.

This is one of the Nightline episodes featuring my mother, both when she was speaking about he loss of her babies (there was another still to come) and after she had begun chemo for her own leukemia. The photographs shown by her have me in them. One is from Christmas time.

The years to come would be full of chaos, and not ones I’ll go into now. But the last Christmas I spent at “home” was just days after my 18th birthday and I never made it to Christmas Day. My mother gave me an ultimatum that I was not willing to take. I saw it, still see it, as something that would have compromised my integrity and even all those years ago I somehow knew my integrity was the thing I had to cling to - quite literally for my life.

On Christmas Eve, sometime in the afternoon, I was told to leave. My clothes were put on the front porch. My step-grandmother mentioned in the note above was visiting, but there was no protection from the storm that was my mother and me.

I took what I could and I left. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in my boyfriend’s empty apartment because he was with his family up North. I never went back home after that Christmas and I have not received anything from family since.

In my young adult years I lived the create-a-family model of Christmas. When I owned bars in my twenties, I had to put up a stocking for each person who worked for me. I’m not certain but I think there were as many as 75 stockings.

We also had a hella Christmas party each year. Truly, epic. And each one included some over-the-top sentimental speech from me. It’s amazing any of my friends still speak to me.

My Christmas day tradition became having employees and friends over if they had no where to go. One year I had a few Mexicans and a crazy Australian and a few other nationalities that I can’t remember and we gathered and I cooked in the apartment over the restaurant I owned. It was fun, and I’m glad I did it.

After I had children, clearly Christmas became about them. And there has been a lot of joy over the years, as we all know watching kids open their presents will take the bah-humbug out of anyone.

But the truth I have to tell is that even then, I felt enough sadness in me to make it something I really saw as doing the best I could for them, and trying to be strong was job one. Some years it was easier than others.

In 2013, Christmas would once again be a time of the dying.

This time, it was my mother. She had just gone through her second chemo in hospital and the goal was to get her home by Christmas. But she was struggling, and that began to look less likely as it got closer. Honestly, I cannot remember the exact timeline, but I know I was out picking up a present and I got the call that she had crashed very soon after being sent home with morphine and syringes. (She did not have the benefit of the Camp Lejeune family program for expenses not covered by Medicare, and there is little question she was ‘kicked’ early because her resources simply ran out. Another reason I fight for those who are ill now.)

I was told they had worked her in the Ambulance during the long ride to the hospital. They lost her a few times.

I drove down to North Carolina from Rhode Island. Down to where she had been hospitalized in Greensboro. She would not go home again. It would be the weeks of December and January that would forever hold not only her loss, not only the loss of her, but also the memory of her dying.

After my mother died in hospice in January, I went to her house in order to rest and decide what would come next.

Before going into the hospital, she had decorated her table for Christmas. It had not been touched since. This is the table, which her husband at the time left untouched for months after.

The bottle of whiskey in the photo would, tragically, become his life after she was gone.

This year, 2015, has been intense even judged by the measurements of my life. And this year I find myself looking forward because it is most likely the last one I will have with my children living at home. The meaning I made during their childhood, the solid vow of them having non-traumatic and safe and fun holidays will always be there, but it will never be the same now that they are moving into their adult existence.

Now that I am moving on, singularly, in order to embark upon what I hope will be a second act which takes full advantage of the wisdom of the first act but never attempts to be like it — or even to follow its lead.

I am cutting my own cord now, and that is made easier by the fact that I have spent more than one Christmas day completely alone. (My kids went to their dad’s after the Santa delivery was dealt with.)

I have had many charitable friends try to make me feel a part of a family — but the truth, my truth, is that I cannot do that anymore.

I have reached the place of no meaning. No meaning of loss or nostalgia or tragic memories, not the wishing and hoping for something to fill in the place where family and tradition might be if things were different. No meaning, good or bad.

Just a resting place.

Once you get used to being alone on Christmas Day, there is actually a calm that sets in.

From now on it might be Netflix binges and Indian food that are the thing.

Or working on something important.

Or feeling lonely.

All I know is that it will be, whatever it is.