Holiday Disasters: Keeping Christmas

Thanksgiving to New Year’s 1992-1993

I have already told the story in some detail—many would perhaps say too much detail—of my mother’s death.  LINK But I have not yet told it, or seen it, as a Christmas story, as one of four holiday seasons dominated by illness, medical anxiety, and haunted by the sounds and lights of the season.

I am on sabbatical, so I do not have to take a dependent care leave to be with my mother as she is being treated in New York for congestive heart failure, and later, for lung cancer. I say treated, but there is little treatment and less care at the NYU hospital about ten blocks from my mother’s apartment. Hospitals are full, a fact that the ICU nurses vaguely attribute to the “AIDS crisis.” I have been in New York since mid-October; my son Ross and husband Scott came with me and returned to Houston so Scott could finish out this semester of teaching. There is as yet no Zooming, which, 30 years later, when the hospitals fill again, would have allowed him to stay with me. Thanksgiving and my birthday are a blank to me. We may have had some faint celebration, perhaps a turkey, but only if Scott had been there to cook it.  For all I know, or remember, Scott and Ross may have been there to perform, in gray, my mother’s favorite holiday.

So now there is Christmas. My family has flown in—perhaps as early as the first week of December. When I open the door to them, Scott hands the year-old Ross to me like a hostess gift. Ross is in my arms before Scott crosses the threshold. I hold his solid little body close to mine and take him inside to an apartment full of beautiful objects that he could break and objects that could break him. Some of these are the same objects. And many of them cannot be put away. Take, for instance, the Tiger Table, a behemoth of a piece with an intricate mosaic of a prowling tiger, sharp corners at Ross’s eye-level, and a shiny ebony wood surround that I had spent my girlhood trying not to smudge. The fact of these pieces, both vulnerable and dangerous, means that one of us must always be watching Ross. There will be no fantasized second pair of hands, but there will be someone there in the empty apartment, someone to plan with, to advise me, to complain to.

My mother is still in the hospital. She will, we are told, be home for Christmas. Christmas, with all its freight of my father’s illness and deaths death, is fast approaching. I have managed somehow to buy and have delivered a new stove to replace the one that had sickened with my mother. This is my biggest accomplishment, since before this moment I would never have imagined that one could buy a major appliance in Manhattan—and have it delivered and installed on time and in a window between hospital visits. I don’t think I ask myself on time for what, but surely, if I do, the answer is for Christmas dinner. I am both annoyed and relieved when I realize that there is no choice when it comes to stoves. I have what, since Obama’s experience of it, people have come to call decision fatigue. For me this has taken the form of consequential choices about my mother’s care that did not feel like choices at all: when to roam the halls searching for a doctor, how assertive to be when and if I find one, when and how to interven when my eighty-year-old uncle, who is still practicing medicine but not surgery, was being particularly rude and dismissive of the medical staff, what to tell my mother about her condition and when.

And now Scott and I have to decide what to do about Christmas, which, as we tell each other without regard for originality, will come no matter what we do. We may have said “come and go” although we try not to imagine too far into the future: after Christmas is for moving my mother to Houston for treatment. We decide to make an effort, to make, to misapply the lyrics from Mame, “a little Christmas.” This will not be another year, like the one in which my father died thirteen years ago, in which Christmas disappeared. Scott remembers a miniature Christmas tree, sitting on a table out of Ross’s reach. I remember a blank corner where, in this living-room that has been transported to Italy and back, the trees of my childhood used to be. Scott may be remembering the Christmases we shared with my mother, after my father died, when everything got smaller.

We will, we decide, have what we in other circumstances might refer to as our traditional Christmas Eve dinner.  My uncle and his partner—my mother would prefer “ladyfriend” come as they always have. Scott uses the new stove to make a ham, which he scores, glazes with raspberry jelly, and studs with raspberries and cloves. I make my mother’s mashed potatoes, the famous-in-my-family Gladys Potatoes which she has eaten almost every day of her life, even serving them with pasta. Actually, they have achieved fame (a little) beyond my family. Once, during her life in Italy before I was born, she got up in mid-meal to crash the kitchen of her favorite restaurant to teach them how to make them.

My mother stays in her bedroom, during the preparation; this feels very far away from the kitchen, even in a small apartment. It is as if my mother, her bed, and her bedroom have already receded to a place I cannot reach. I make a point of traversing the space to ask for cooking advice, especially about the potatoes, although I have made them many times in my home and hers. She tells me, as she always does, not to forget the onion, which to my mind, has never made a difference. Tonight, it does. I must have made some kind of a vegetable, because I always was the one to insist on them. My uncle and his ladyfriend (one word or two?) bring the shockingly expensive cake from St Ambroseus bakery that my mother buys for my birthdays, although they have never approved of it for reasons of economy. It is shaped like a chestnut, and contains many layers of chestnut mousse and meringue. In future Christmases, I will begin to collect ornaments shaped like pinecones and acorns, looking usually in vain, until a family trip to Venice, for glass chestnuts.

It turns out I am ravenous. As a recovering pescatarian, I am unused to ham. Its saltiness seems to move from my tongue through my veins like the first sip of broth after an illness. I am ashamed to eat so much. My mother is not at the table, although we leave an empty place at the head of it where in happier times she would sit with Scott, sipping coffee sodas with ice cream and talking late into the night while I tried to sleep in my girlhood bedroom transported, like the living room, whole and unaltered from New York to Rome and then back again. On this night, she occasionally calls out to us from her bed, promising to join us in a few minutes. Finally, I take two plates of cake to her room and end up eating them both, making sure to cut from my favorite part at the top of the chestnut, which has an odd sort of acorn-like cap made of buttercream.

After our guests go home, Scott and I clear the table using my mother’s silver crumb roller that has fascinated and repelled me since childhood. We put away the black-and-white placemats I made for mother in a brief moment when I took up quilting in New Orleans. They are my best work as a quilter, but they are not very good; the squares on the outside are misshapen, bowed by the tension of the ones in the middle. I look at my mother’s unused placemat with no trace on it of jelly or ham, no wine stain, no smudge of mashed potatoes or chestnut cream. I burst into tears and run to my girly bedroom so my mother won’t hear me, knowing all the while that in this apartment you can hear every sound.

Christmas does in fact come and go. Surely there were presents, if only for Ross, but I do not remember them. We dress Ross in a tiny cashmere sweater my mother gave him last year that he was at the time much too small to wear. It is a tiny red and blue cardigan, its shape suited to an old man. We joke that he looks like a professor, which Scott and I have been told separately—I think for different reasons—that we do not.

Boxing Day, the anniversary of my father’s death, comes as it always will, the day after Christmas. With it comes the obligation for me to write not one but two papers for the annual Modern Language Association Conference, held this year, luckily, I guess, in New York. The papers are terrible, worse even than the one I wrote purely as a way of getting to a conference in Dijon, what my friends and I call a “ticket paper.” These papers have no argument and few main verbs; the latter are the first to go for me under stress. Somehow, I do not consider dropping out of the conference. This idea that I could have just not gone comes to me only many years later with COVID, with quiet quitting, with the idea of mental health that is so ubiquitous that the NFL will, in the first days of 2023, cancel for the first time a game in which someone is badly injured. What would have happened in those pre-COVID years if I had pleaded mental health, my mother’s illness, my inability to conjugate?

When I am not writing or giving execrable papers, I am preparing to take my mother to Houston, where the NYU doctors suggest she can undergo chemotherapy. I spend hours on the phone with M.D Anderson, then the top ranked cancer hospital in the nation. We get an appointment for the second week in January, by which time my mother will be dead, having survived the New Year by three days. Our tickets are for New Year’s Day; my mother has not celebrated New Year’s Eve since Italy, where there were sparklers and people in the neighborhood threw their worn out household items onto the street below. I have always hated New Years, as I hate all holidays that are about the consumption of alcohol. We let all celebrations go, and wait, as we have in 2012, 2013, when Ross was ill, and in the COVID years, for the new year to bring better things.