The next day his mother left the hospital–with a cancer everyone knew was incurable but that was not supposed fell her just yet. Death and her soul had other plans. She went home, crawled into bed that night and slipped away.
I haven’t asked my friend if he had a Christmas present already wrapped for his mother. Eventually, I probably will, but not yet. I am fairly certain that he had a gift in mind–maybe one already chosen, or bought, maybe something on a shelf still unwrapped. What do you buy for a loved one you know is dying?
It seems like only last year, but it was several years ago that I gave my father, Ronald Reagan, a snow globe with a quaint wintry scene encased in a glass bubble. He was already drifting out to sea by then, pulled by a pirate called Alzheimer’s. The globe held an image from another time: a horse-drawn carriage, carefree people, safe streets and warmly lit buildings. And then there was the magic of turning it upside down and upright again so the snow could fall gently on that small fantasy world.
Anyone who has lived through the long passage of a loved one dying knows this to be true: you become a student of how the disease is carving them up. What is it stealing? What is left? What can be given–on a holiday like Christmas when you want so desperately to give–that they will relate to, enjoy, understand? For my father, at that stage of Alzheimer’s, the visual experience of a snow globe was something that could keep him entranced for quite a while. Now, his eyes gaze past me to faraway shores where I can’t follow, nor even understand.
There are thousands of people this Christmas who won’t be giving gifts to friends, to husbands, wives, sons, daughters, parents–people they had perhaps already bought things for, or at least thought about. Across this country there will be so many gifts not given, all because those people went to work at the World Trade Center or Pentagon on a bright blue morning, or got on a plane, and in a horrible fiery instant became memories.
What do we do with the gifts we want to give to people who aren’t here, or who are leaving–who are far away from us even though we can still touch them, hold their hands?
I don’t know if I have an answer, but I have a thought. We can give to the world the best of what our friends and loved ones gave to us. My father stands stalwart in my heart as an example of patience and faith. He didn’t believe in fear; he believed in talking to God, and listening to the whisper of God’s response. He believed in lifting his life up to huge, mysterious hands and trusting that those hands would take him where he needed to go. When you are witness to disease, when you feel helpless and you know death is lurking, panic also waits in the shadows. It crawls through your pores. Fear seems reasonable, an entitlement. But my father would say–if he could, “Don’t be afraid, just trust.” The gift I can give him is to follow his lead. I don’t know when the end will come, only that it will. I don’t know how to lose a parent, but I am willing to learn, and stretch my heart around all that it entails.
My friend returned to Los Angeles with a wooden box containing his mother’s ashes. The box was small; the experience was not. “That little box,” he said, “contains my life. It’s the whole circle–my birth, my life and her leaving.” He will spend Christmas week packing up her things, wrapping carefully the treasures she gathered in her many decades here in this sad, strange, uncertain world.
He is giving her the gift of his care, his reverence for what she cherished here–even if he might never have wanted for his own the tiny porcelain figurines and delicate boxes. With every tuck of bubble wrap, every strip of tape, he is giving her a fiber of his heart. It can’t be gift-wrapped, or tied with ribbon, or even handed to the person who is now somewhere else. But it is, perhaps, the reason we thought of giving in the first place.
Everyone who is sad this Christmas, who is missing someone, is feeling those feelings because of what was given to them–a life lesson, a stitch embroidered in their soul, a memory that death can’t take away. We are now entrusted with the awesome task of figuring out how to return those precious gifts–not with a price tag, or a card, or any of the embellishments that we associate with holiday gift-giving. But with our hearts, our souls, with all the turbulence, passion, grief and joy that strain against the seams of who we always believed we were. We aren’t those people anymore. We’re bigger. Bigger, and sadder and wiser than we ever thought we would be. Christmas is about miracles. Sometimes miracles rise up from the deepest aches and the darkest nights. Sometimes they end up cradled in our hands and hearts, and the task is just reaching out as far as we can.
