The Last Christmas
January 2, 2020
ALAN writes:
It was twenty years ago that my mother spent the last Christmas in her apartment at Maryville Gardens, on the property that had once been the site of Maryville College.
It was twenty years ago that I sat there with her as we talked about Christmas memories, listened to Christmas carols and songs, and watched Christmas movies from the 1940s and 1950s.
It was twenty years ago that it became unbearably clear to me and to her that her memory was beginning to fail. It was a preview of what has been called “death in slow motion.” What followed was a three-year nightmare of continued loss, worry, frustration, uncertainty, and regrets. If I felt all those things acutely, as I did, then it must have been so much worse for her. But she never talked much about it, and I never encouraged her to do so. The realization that it was happening was bad enough. She knew there was nothing we could do about it. I knew it too, and I hated it.
On that night, we sat there in the comfort and warmth of her apartment, admiring the beauty of the lights on her Christmas tree and the ornaments that she had made and placed upon it and the Christmas village that she had made and placed under it.
It was the penultimate chapter in her life. She still found pleasure in decorating her Christmas tree and the village beneath it, just as she did when I was a boy in the 1950s and when I must have absorbed some of the joy she felt in looking forward to what for us was the happiest time of year.
The decorations were always modest. There was never anything pretentious or overdone in her sense of life or in the decorations that she chose to make Christmas at our house just right for family and friends who would come to visit.
She no longer baked Christmas cookies. No longer could I feel the eager anticipation of homemade Christmas cookies packed carefully into colorful cookie tins with winter scenes on their lids. All of that was now just a memory.
Her two brothers and two sisters were gone, as were all of her aunts and uncles. No longer would we hear the old familiar voices in conversation, laughter, and reminiscing. A cousin and two sisters-in-law were still alive, but one of them lived far away and the other two were dealing with their own problems caused by aging. All of them are now gone. Her circle of older, longtime friends had been diminished considerably because of distance or death. All of them are now gone.
While sitting with her at her dining room table, we talked about her older brother, my Uncle Lawrence, who had died 23 years earlier but who continued to live in her memory and mine and some of whose mannerisms she said she now saw in me.
We watched movies she had enjoyed from years long past: 1954’s White Christmas, 1944’s Going My Way, 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s, and 1953’s By the Light of the Silvery Moon—always movies whose tone and texture pointed upwards, never downward.
She could remember Christmas days with her parents in the 1920s-‘30s when she and her brother eagerly awaited the moment when they first saw their Christmas tree, and when she may have received an orange or a doll. Having grown up in those years, they acquired an understanding of proportion that equipped them well for the rest of their lives. It became part of their worldview and frame of mind, as thoroughly unknown and alien to people in today’s world as the ability to sit quietly in a room.
For her, never again would Christmas be what it had been for 78 years. In some of those years, I was not there with her at Christmas, a circumstance that did not seem important to me at those times. But from the perspective of distance in time, the mistake I made became evident. It left me feeling much the way Barbara Stanwyck’s character felt in the 1940 motion picture Remember the Night in the scene where prosecuting attorney Fred MacMurray takes her to his home in Indiana for the Christmas holidays. Even though she is a jewel thief, he and his mother treat her with kindness instead of disdain. She does not expect such kindness and it moves her to tears.
In effect, what I stole from my mother was not jewels but something much more valuable: Time and opportunities, a theft for which there was no excuse and for which years later I accused and convicted myself in bitterest regret. It was an example of the truth in Kierkegaard’s remark that “The problem with life is that it must be lived forward, but can be understood only when looking back”. I could testify to that.
In her mind, I was always ten years old, the way I imagine it is for most mothers and sons.
When I left her apartment that night, I decided to take a walk. It was a cold, clear night, but it was not brutally cold, and there was snow on the ground. For me, walking has always been conducive to thinking. I had a lot of thinking to do about what would happen if her memory loss worsened, as I imagined it would.
Walking through snow-covered landscapes can be delightful and invigorating. It was not especially delightful for me that night, but neither was it disagreeable. The night, the snow, the cold, and the solitary walk gave me an excellent opportunity to think about the evanescence of life, the passage of years, and the inevitability of what lay ahead.
