Death at Christmas

My great-aunt Sarah just called. I would tell you her age but it's impolite to ask a lady such information and so it would be wildly inappropriate to proclaim it here in public. My mother (her niece--she's my mother's father's sister) sent her a small live Christmas tree and signed my name and my sisters'. So she called to thank me.

She is my namesake (I go by my middle name); I lived with her during the summers when I was in college. When Mike and I got married, I got dressed and ready in her tidy south St. Louis living room. In our first year of marriage, we often went over there for dinner and a game of scrabble.

I am a member of just an offshoot of her family--she has two children of her own, who have 6 children between them and there are, I think, 15 in the next generation--my children's third cousins. And she means different things to them than she does to me, I am sure. Because she's not my grandmother, she simply became my friend. I read her writing and borrowed her typewriter myself because I liked the feel of writing that way. We went through photos and letters my grandfather sent home from the war. I soaked up family stories, which in my haste to be 21, I have muddled up in my own memory. But I could probably tease them out if I needed to.

She's dying. It's no secret. When I asked her just now how she was doing, her shaky voice told me more than her words. "But I'm not in any pain," she reassured me. She thanked me for the tree.

"It was my mom's idea, and she was nice enough to include us," I admit.

"Well, we can forgive her for that," she said with that same dry humor I remembered. Complete lucidity. She knew my kids' names and asked how third grade was going for Sophia.

"Have a Merry Christmas with your family." I repeated the sentiment. And suddenly I was deeply moved and didn't want to get off the phone but her words were breathless and I knew she needed to hang up. "Goodbye now."

I had one of those moments when I step outside of myself for just a brief flash and become my own narrator. And that was the last time they spoke, came into my mind. I wondered if she'd make it to Christmas this year. I wondered why that mattered. If she crossed over the winter solstice and was granted another spring, would that make death easier?

This time of year, whether it's due to the gathering darkness or to the years of tradition built up around us, we find ourselves dwelling in memory. Christmas, perhaps, being such an easy day to remember--kids, presents, tree, food--we recall them more clearly and in order in a way that we do not recall all our September 27s or May 9s. Even other holidays are more blurred, for me at least. Easter, 4th of July, Thanksgiving. They amalgamate easily. But I remember the Christmases each pretty well.

I remember the first Christmas without my grandmother. I remember the first Christmas with my sister Colleen. I remember thinking Mike's Uncle Leo was just going to walk through that door last Christmas. I'm sure I'll catch myself thinking the same thing of Tom this year. I've never spent a Christmas Day around a tree or at church with Sarah, but somehow I know I'll notice the absence, whether it's three weeks from now or next year. I won't think of it in June or October, but Advent will come around again and there she will be.

Or rather, there she won't be.