Holiday Disasters: Boxing Day

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan's pow'r
When we were gone astray
Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy.

It is the middle of December, 1978, and I am pushing my way through the holiday crowds. I carry with me the bodily memory of other Christmases: the feel of the cold air on my bare head (I have always resisted hats); the smell of gas and greenery, the heft of my purse tightened across my body against mugging; my sense of agility as I move from gap to gap in the moving forest of taller people. There is a soundtrack to my movements, but it is only this year that I stop midflow to listen to it. Over the honking of taxis and the groan of busses as they pull up to curb, comes the sound of carols, until this Christmas —the one where my father is in the hospital, dying, a few blocks away—mere background noise.

This year I do not want to hear about the Little Town of Bethlehem, about reindeer or drummer boys or angels singing. I want only to hear a carol that has always annoyed me: “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” I am still uninterested in the gentleman, and only instrumentally in the Savior, but I want to hear, as many times as possible, the tidings of comfort and joy that will mean that my father will get well. The tidings, of course, are part of the chorus, which means I hear them several times each time the song is played. I have—and I realized this only 45 years later— apparently also made up a verse. This is how it went; this is how I remembered it until yesterday: “God rest ye merry gentlemen/let nothing you dismay/but health and peace and happiness be yours this Christmas day.” No Satan, who in the real lyrics appears in both choirs and verse, but a homier and more intimate form of comfort to a young woman arrested by a particular song on the threshold of Bloomingdale’s.

My father died on Boxing Day, a holiday that, among my acquaintances, only he celebrated. He was Canadian, which explains this and also some other things about him. Drawing from a British and colonial history of distributing presents to servants and later service people on the day after Christmas, he would make up boxes for the milkman, the potato delivery man, my babysitter, and others. Each box, carefully calibrated as to size and shape would contain new bills, carefully laid out, and small gifts like handkerchiefs and candy. When we moved to New York and to a building with doormen and a super, the boxes and the gifts disappeared and the whole process moved up to the weeks before Christmas. The responsibility also became my mother’s; I would come home in mid December to find her with a pile of colored envelopes and ten-dollar bills, matching varying amounts to different names on a long list and puzzling over comparisons and equivalences.  In our family, Boxing Day, with its specific relation to privilege, obligation, and generosity, died before my father did.

When he got sick, he and my mother were living in Rome. From the perspective of a daughter in college an ocean away, I would say that it was a peaceful time in their marriage: long drives in the Italian countryside, excellent food, an apartment they loved with room for my father’s woodworking. My father, out from the shadow of New York, drank less and sent more time at home. My mother wrote every week to say how much she missed me, but our phone calls—also weekly, not daily, as they had been during my first year in college when they lived 60 miles away—were cheerful. I blossomed in this time of intimate distance. At the time I would have said that my parents were finally treating me like an adult, but I realize now that the more important development was that I was treating them in this way. Although I had never exactly had trouble thinking of my mother and father as individuals, I had persisted in seeing their marriage as centering on me as the proud product of it. Now, especially after a summer vacation with them in which they retraced, on the Mediterranean coast of Italy, their favorite journeys from the years before I was born, I felt that I understood something about them together.

A few weeks after I returned from Italy, I learned in the same phone call that my parents were returning to New York and that my father had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer—then, although I did not know it, likely a death sentence. I was spending the rest of the summer in D.C. with my college roommate and eventual co-author Naomi, interning for an organization that recruited women to run for political office. Like many such organizations, it was not sure what to do with its summer interns, so I had a lot of spare time which I used to do research in the Library of Congress for my senior thesis on the figure of Eve in Milton, Charlotte Bronte, and, oddly, D.H. Lawrence. I don’t know everything that went into my parents’ decision to seek treatment in New York; it must have due partly to the reputation of Sloan Kettering’s as a destination cancer hospital and to the presence of my mother’s brother Leo, who served, sometimes problematically, as our family doctor. Even without these reasons for return, I think my mother’s impulse would have been to come home: to the city, to her surviving brother, to me, and to the apartment in which she had lived as a teenager and a young adult.

The day before my parents were due to arrive, I took the train from D.C.  to help my uncle move out of the large front room to a tiny one behind the refrigerator that had been my mother’s bedroom when she lived there. My uncle’s apartment was not yet a scene of hoarding, but it was full of objects, precious and not-so precious, that had to be lifted one by one and deposited in my late grandparents’ empty bedroom. The idea was for me to visit weekly at first from D.C. and then, when the semester began, from Princeton.  I have no memory of where I slept in that apartment; during the months of my father’s treatment, when he moved back and forth from the hospital to Leo’s apartment, my place was in my late grandmother’s chair, the one where she spent her last, agoraphobic, years. Blind in one eye, with a dicey heart, she would sit and think about her birth family, revising to and for herself, the story of her growing up.

It was on my birthday in late November that we all found out that the cancer had metastasized to the stomach. I use this phrase, with its impersonal “the” because that is what I might say now, and because that is the language that I have heard three times, although not always at Christmas. My mother’s doctors: “we will check if it has metastasized to the brain.” My aunt Betty’s: “It has likely metastasized from the liver.” And, mercifully, my son’s oncologist: “There is no sign of metastasis.” After my father’s death, I found my father had employed more informal, or at least more agentive language in his notebook: under the date and “H Birthday”, I read “Drs Found traces of cancer in stomach”.  I was 20, the age my son would be when he was himself diagnosed, but (or is it and?) my parents protected me from the implications of this information. And perhaps my father also protected my mother. I am not sure the word “metastasis,” was even used. 

I returned to college and continued to work on my senior thesis. Although it would be almost a year until I had to turn it in, I argued with my advisor about the title. He did not want me to call it “Three Faces of Eve,” which he found to be trivializing, Throughout the text I carefully cited the work of feminist literary critic Ellen Moers, who was also, to me thrillingly, the mother of a close friend in high school. She had been the first person I knew to write a feminist book, and the first to undergo chemotherapy. Even as I cited her, I knew that she was likely “in treatment.” Although I had lost touch with my friend, someone I knew had seen his mother on the street looking frail and—this made an impression because my father was disappearing before my eyes—“swollen.”

Moers (whom I knew as Mrs Mayer) died just before or just after my father, depending on if you believe Wikipedia’s lifespan dates (1922-1978) or the text of the entry on the Wiki site, which declares that she died in August of 1979. I don’t remember writing a letter of condolence or calling my friend, although I may have done so in the twilight tunnel following my father’s death, perhaps after writing a footnote to the person who to me both was and was not Jimmy’s mother. Either way, if I did not write, I was a bad friend, and alsomissed out on the comfort of a shared experience at a time when I felt so profoundly alone.

If I had written, I would have reminded my friend of the time his parents drove us both back from Long Island at the end of our senior year, when we had stopped at their country club from dinner and I’d had to borrow his mother’s dress. It was torture to pull the dress over my badly sunburned skin, but as the dress—a grownup sheath dress-- slipped over my shoulders I realized with a sudden sense of pride and connection that it fit, as they say like a second skin, although it chafed and fought with my first. There was the dress, there was the country club, and there may have been wine—all firsts for me. Throughout dinner, I became more and more physically uncomfortable, my face and hands darkening and swelling. When we finally got to the city, my mother opened the door to a daughter in a strange dress, her face so puffy she could not see her eyes. My parents undressed me and put me to bed. My father applied baking soda paste with an eye dropper held a few inches above my screaming skin. My friends pitied me as I had to skip other senior celebrations. I held tight to my memories of the country club, to feeling grown up in the dress of someone famous. Now, of course, I know that my insistence on sunbathing and my bout with sun poisoning (it was not the only one) dramatically raised my odds of skin cancer and of dying, like my mother (smoking), and my father (smoking and drinking) of my sins.

I returned to New York and to my uncle’s apartment as soon as classes were over in December. I would visit every morning and stay until after the lunch my father never touched. On Christmas Eve, my mother and I took advantage of extended visiting hours to meet at dusk in my father’s hospital room to—did we use this comforting and banal term?—exchange presents. I have no memory of what I bought for my father. My mother had two presents she had bought that day: the first was ostensibly from my father to her, a beautiful silver seal coat from her favorite thrift shop, sleek for the length of her body, and flaring to feathery fur at the bottom. This was her second fur coat; the first, also a seal, but nowhere near as beautiful, had been a matter of much saving up, and much deliberation, much sanctimonious anti-fur lecturing on my part. I had no appreciation then of the role that fur coats played in the lives of a certain class of women of my mother’s generation. Her dark brown seal (she never said “seal coat”) with its beige leather trim, was for her a sign of my father’s success and love. It was never quite, I think, the coat she dreamed of owning. The coat she bought for herself from my father two days before his death was that coat. “Try it on,” my father said from the bed. These might or might not have been his second-to-last words. “Spin around” might or might not have been his last.

My mother had a present for him as well: a soft green hat of the kind men wore in 1978. She had, no doubt, bought it weeks ago when it would have served as a sign of hope that he would someday leave the hospital. She put it on him and turned away. We left soon—quickly—afterwards, walking past the tinseled tree on the deserted nurses’ station. The nurses were in the recreation room at a holiday party; there was music, I am not sure what songs were playing. “And to you,” we said in answer to their greeting.

That night we returned to my uncle’s apartment and lit his beautiful green lamp to serve, sort of, as a tree. I sat in my grandmother’s armchair, and my mother perched on a hardbacked velvet chair, also my grandmother’s, but when she was younger. It seemed like a betrayal—of my mother? My father? to read, but not, somehow, to watch tv. It was Christmas Eve, the night my family would have their holiday dinner, and one of the few times I remember not eating. I have no memory of Christmas day, just an odd feeling of offering and being offered presents that we had not bothered to wrap. Surely, we went to visit my father, but, hard as I try, the last image of him is of the hat, and the green shadow it threw on his face from the day before.  We came home again, to the two chairs and the lamp and the tv. My uncle, who had stopped at the hospital, called us around midnight to say that my father was “very sick” and then it was Boxing Day.