The last time we were together: A Christmas fiasco
The last time we were all together for Christmas, she’d been dead less than eight months.
Christmas was her thing. My mom did a lot of stuff on our behalf: practiced Catholicism, donated to charity, believed in the Christmas spirit. My sisters and I liked Christmas, but she was on another level. She just radiated this sweet, goofy enthusiasm from Thanksgiving to Christmas, turning up “Feliz Navidad” whenever it came on the radio, baking dozens of cookies to give to everyone from her bank teller to the mailman, and spending too much money on gifts. She lived for her family, so Christmas was her favorite time of year.
After she died in April of 2002, my sisters and I divvied up her Christmas decorations. My dad didn’t want them—he hadn’t grown up with much in the way of Christmas traditions, and he grudgingly abided my mom’s enthusiasm for the holiday. He saw hassle where she saw happiness. During her last Christmas, he grumpily sat on the sofa and watched TV while the rest of us—including mom, who was beginning the final stages of her terminal illness—put the decorations away. “CAN'T BE BOTHERED” would be on my dad’s battle flag like “COME AND TAKE IT” if he could rouse himself to make one.
When fall rolled around, the question hung over us: What would we do for Christmas? Melissa, 13 years older than I and the eldest child, had moved back to our hometown of Houston a couple years earlier after my mom was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. She had a 3-year-old son, a 1-year-old daughter, and was pregnant with a baby who had Down syndrome. Nancy, 11 years older than I, had moved from Houston to Colorado with her husband not long after my mom’s diagnosis. I was unmarried, 26, and living in Chicago. I had no other plans.
I think we felt compelled to get together, because we knew that’s what she would want. We were all still wracked with grief, and the routine offered comfort. We were four electrons without a nucleus, but we maintained our orbits all the same.
Nancy had to leave before Christmas, so we decided to have a partial, early Christmas on December 23 at Melissa’s house, located a couple blocks from my dad’s. Even without his house taken over by Christmas, my dad looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. He groused about taking a family photo. He treated my gift to him dismissively. I understood that he was hurting like the rest of us—probably more so—but it’s hard to feel empathy for someone who’s behaving like a jagoff. We opened a few presents and then walked back to my dad’s place to see Nancy off.
“I think we felt compelled to get together, because we knew that’s what she would want. We were all still wracked with grief, and the routine offered comfort.”
My mom and dad had this wrought-iron coffee table with legs that curled up at the bottom. They didn’t curve up into points, but they weren’t covered in Nerf, either. And when my 17-month-old niece, Ellie, stumbled into one head-first, she immediately began bleeding profusely—and it looked like it was coming from her eye. We called an ambulance, and after Melissa and her husband, Rob, rode off in it with Ellie, I was tasked with watching my 3-year-old nephew, Liam, for the duration.
The temperature was at least in the mid-60s, maybe warmer that day. Christmastime in Houston is typically mild, so much so that I took for granted as a kid picking out a Christmas tree while wearing a T-shirt. The “white Christmas” iconography of the holiday was never my experience; when I found a 45 of Gene Autry’s “If It Doesn’t Snow On Christmas” in my parents’ record cabinet as a little kid, I was perplexed by the question in the song’s chorus: “If it doesn’t snow on Christmas, how is Santa gonna use his sleigh?” The few times it snowed in Houston during my childhood, the city was utterly paralyzed by a light dusting.
The day of Ellie’s accident, a light gray blanket of clouds covered the sky, but as the afternoon progressed, the clouds darkened. Houston lies just 45 miles off the Gulf of Mexico, which ensures regular visits from sky-blackening thunderstorms throughout the year. As I kept my nephew busy with Elmo videos, I noticed the skies growing more ominous. It started raining at some point in the evening, probably around the time I tucked him into bed.
When the lightning started and the wind kicked up, it still didn’t strike me as unusual. I was watching CNN, which had reported that Joe Strummer of The Clash had died unexpectedly. The storm would soon have my undivided attention, though, as the rain fell horizontally and thunder and lightning became continual. When I flipped channels, the local news had broken into whatever was on to warn people about the severe storm blowing through the city. That’s when the tornado warning came.
I knew that a warning only meant conditions were right for tornadic activity, not that one was imminent. A tornado was coming if the radar showed a tight curl to indicate rotation—as it did moments later. And this rotation was happening just a few miles east of my sister’s house and heading toward us.
Melissa and Rob were still at the hospital with Ellie. My dad was probably watching TV on the sofa at his house, paying no attention to the storm. I was by myself with a 3-year-old sleeping in the other room in a region of the country where houses don’t have basements.
I called my dad. “What should we do?” I asked, trying not to sound freaked out. “Eh, don’t worry about it,” he said, unfazed by the fact that a tornado was probably on the ground and heading for us. I imagined seeing him in the twister like Dorothy seeing Miss Gulch, only instead of riding a bike he’d be in a recliner, napping as he was sucked into the upper atmosphere.
I knew my best bet was to get in the bathtub, so I put a blanket in it, grabbed the mattress from the crib to shield us, then laid my still-sleeping nephew in the tub. I stayed close by, eyeing the TV and weather outside for the first sign to jump in the tub with him and cover up.
The tornado never arrived, and news reports would say later that it was straight-line winds, not a tornado, that wreaked havoc on the area. The damage sure looked like a tornado. One building on the news had pieces of wood embedded in its walls from the high winds. Trees were down. Christmas decorations strewn all over the place. I returned the mattress to the crib and my nephew to his bed, then raided my sister’s fridge in search of alcohol.
The next day, Ellie was back with a few stitches over her eye but in fine shape otherwise. That crisis had passed, but another was beginning.
Melissa had gotten pregnant not long after my mom died, her third child in four years and due not long before her 40th birthday in February. When early prenatal tests showed abnormalities, Melissa had an amniocentesis, which confirmed everyone’s fears: The baby had Down syndrome. Worse, the severity of the baby’s health and cognitive disabilities couldn’t be known until birth: Some high-functioning people who have Down syndrome get jobs and live on their own; others can suffer severe health problems that drastically limit their independence. The uncertainty leads many women to terminate their pregnancies, and Melissa’s doctors unsubtly nudged her in that direction. She and Rob responded by naming the fetus Faith.
Down syndrome makes for a risky pregnancy, and that combined with Melissa’s age meant she spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. On Christmas Eve, she had an appointment that showed Faith had a dangerously low heart rate. Melissa’s doctor visit stretched from the afternoon and into the night, while I stayed at her place with Liam and Ellie. Rob eventually came home to relieve me, but Melissa would be taking her second ambulance trip in two days as she was transferred to the hospital, where she’d remain until Faith was born.
I had planned to go to Christmas Eve mass in honor of my mom, who I think enjoyed it as much for showing off her family as whatever spiritual fulfillment she got from the priest with the comically nasal, effeminate voice. Instead I was delivering some Chik-fil-a to my sister, who was ravenous from a day in the doctor’s office.
Nothing about the situation felt like Christmas, aside from the songs on the radio and the possibility that my sister could be having a baby named Faith on Christmas Day. That’s the kind of on-the-nose treacle that would have us all rolling our eyes, but this wasn’t a drippy Hallmark Channel movie (Have A Little Faith: a Hallmark original). Sometimes life is pretty clichéd.
I left Melissa just before the ambulance arrived to transfer her. When I returned to my dad’s place, he had gone to sleep and the lights were off. In the darkness, the void in the house felt huge. This wasn’t where I had grown up; my parents had sold that house and moved into this one four years prior. Still, it was hard not to dwell on the contrast between this and every Christmas Eve I’d ever known. In a quiet, reflective moment between crises, I felt the absence of my mom more than ever.
I don’t remember when I woke up the next morning, but it was early, like 7 a.m. My dad had the TV on. I probably said, “Merry Christmas,” but that was the extent of our holiday festivities. I called Melissa and found out she had one of her regular stress-induced migraines, but was unable to take medication for it because of the situation with the baby. Her first Christmas without our mom was being spent in a darkened hospital room with an incapacitating headache while waiting for a baby whose health remained a question mark.
“I’m going to see Melissa,” I told my dad. “Really?” he said, surprised. It wasn’t like we were doing anything; I just think he didn’t want to feel obligated to join me. I didn’t tell him he should go, but he knew he should even if he didn’t want to do it.
As we neared the hospital, I turned to pull into the parking garage. “No, don’t park here!” my dad bellowed out of nowhere. “Now we’re going to have to pay these motherfuckers!” It couldn’t have been 9 a.m. yet on Christmas morning, but I already had a cheapskate shouting at me about motherfuckers. In my family, that usually didn’t happen until the afternoon. “Don’t worry,” I said, not hiding my annoyance. “I’ll cover the five bucks.”
“It couldn’t have been 9 a.m. yet on Christmas morning, but I already had a cheapskate shouting at me about motherfuckers.”
It wouldn’t even be that much. We couldn’t stay long, because Melissa was in no shape to take visitors. The migraine incapacitated her, so she lay in bed, eyes covered, in a room with no light except for a TV set to a low volume. Rob would be over soon, not that he could do anything, either. We’d spent an inordinate amount of time in hospitals the preceding two years, nearly all of it tedious. Waiting for my mom’s surgery to finish. Waiting for her treatment to end. Waiting for results to come back. Waiting for the moment we’d dreaded but knew we couldn’t escape.
Our trip to see Melissa was the shortest hospital visit we’d had since my mom was diagnosed. I don’t think we stayed longer than 15 minutes, so I could understand my dad’s annoyance. Twenty minutes to the hospital, 20 minutes back—40 minutes of travel for 15 awkward minutes in a hospital room where we had to keep our voices down because my sister’s head was pounding. We weren’t exactly spreading holiday cheer, but I wasn’t about to leave my sister in the hospital alone on Christmas morning. She’d do the same if the situation were reversed.
I don’t remember how we spent the rest of Christmas. I probably hung out with my niece and nephew the whole day—they were still too young to understand what they were missing—and generally avoided my dad’s place, The House That Christmas Forgot. He was watching TV like it was any other day, not a holiday we all closely associated with my mom. It was his way of dealing, but to me being in that house was like having someone constantly say, “Man, isn’t it so sad your mom’s dead? She was so into Christmas! I bet this is really hard, your mom dying from a horrible, insidious disease at 61—that’s too young! And you’re only in your mid-20s! Have you thought about how she won’t see you get married or ever know your children? That’s so shitty!”
My phone rang sometime around 6 a.m. on December 26, my exasperated sister on the other end practically shouting, “Go to my house and wake up Rob! He won’t answer, and the baby’s coming!” In the space of 30 seconds, I went from dead asleep to sprinting full speed from my dad’s house to my sister’s place. I opened the door and ran in, shaking Rob from the kind of sleep I’d been enjoying only a couple minutes prior. “Rob! You have to go! The baby’s coming!” He roused himself and started gathering his things. “Do I have time to take a shower?” he asked, clearly not lucid enough to understand the silliness of the question.
He barely made it in time, but Faith Patricia (my mom’s name) arrived safely and healthily. She would have to spend a few extra days in the hospital, but Melissa and Rob were thrilled—to the seeming surprise of the nurses, none of whom congratulated them, as if having a baby with Down syndrome were some kind of burden to be tolerated, not celebrated.
I got to see Faith once before I left for Chicago a couple days later. She had to stay in a special nursery, but she looked healthy and happy—and her arrival put an end to the Christmastime crises we’d faced the entire week. We’d survived our first Christmas without my mom by being too distracted to think about her absence. I still clung to any connection I could feel to her, so I liked to think my mom had orchestrated a holiday fiasco to help keep us from dwelling on her being gone. Sappy and improbable? Yup, but when you lose someone so close to you, you’ll believe anything to keep some kind of connection.
A few days later, I’d propose to my longtime girlfriend. With a literal new life at the hospital and a figurative new one on the horizon, it was easy to read some “circle of life” horseshit into it all, but I didn’t. I missed my mom like crazy and was still fairly early in the process of understanding the effect her death would have on my life. While I was out running errands before I left, I listened to Sleater-Kinney’s “O2.”
I want to know
Why it hurts to stay
Hurts to go away
Will I be okay?
Speeding down the freeway on that bright, warm day, I felt I would be.