The Last Christmas

New Year's Eve, and my siblings are packing up their energetic families and putting them into minivans and taking them back north.

Downstairs, kids practice the privilege of innocence and ignore the shadow of death in the house.  Death is an abstraction, illness a fact that requires no special adjustments.

Upstairs, my sister and brother are weeping.  My brother is saying goodbye to my mother, probably for the last time.

Her last words to him are personal, and they belong to my brother.  But they have to do with planting flowers, with having a vision.  Her words are poetic now that drugs and starvation have driven her into the mist,  or perhaps into the light.  "Look around and say, 'I think a cedar tree would look nice here.'"

He weeps like a child.  We all do.

The bonds that a family grows are filled with nerves, and when you pluck them, they sting.

We will not be the same.  And as I pick my way through words, trying to stitch together the eulogy that I will have to give in a few days or weeks, I can't help but think on how all the old Christmases have run up to this one, how each of us was waiting in our various ways for this last Christmas when we were all whole.  Now we will be scarred where once there was flesh and bone.  We'll heal, sort of.   But not really.   I can't write that in a eulogy: I hate how eulogies these days are mostly about those who give them. 

But "I feel," she has told my sister and me, "like my life is intertwined with yours."   This is the privilege of people who love well.  Nobody else gets to feel that.

My brother reluctantly, with a visible grief, drives away with his family.  My sister and her family load their minivan and follow slowly.  Nobody wants to go, to draw this much blood from our own hearts.

I sit by the Christmas tree, and think that I'll have to take off the ornaments one by one from this, the last Christmas tree when we were all really whole, when we were all really in love with one another, and with life, and with love itself.   It will feel to me like plucking the last fruits we will ever taste.

Now, we have to remember, and wait our turn.  Each new Christmas tree will have to stand guard over our children, promising joy and happiness for a time.  It's the bargain we make with life: each joyful moment is real.  Each one builds a huge bank account of love.  

One day, we reach into our pockets and we have to pay for them all at once. 

With luck, the story won't end with that payment.  Christmas is happy for children, hope for adults who believe, a wild surmise for those who would like to believe but have some difficulty with it.

But for now, whatever the state of our faith, we pay this tariff from the treasury of our hearts, and our hearts feel emptier than we ever thought possible.