So it’s 2 am Christmas morning and I think I’ve done pretty good this year. Correction, I know I’ve done good. I’m not doing the happy dance or anything like that, but I haven’t been fantasizing about pulling out in front of large trucks at high speeds either. All the more amazing when you consider I’m usually a mess at Christmas and then the results of the trial on top of it.

♀ will get up in a couple of hours and we’ll spend some time with just us. Then we’ll get my step-son up to do stockings and have breaky. After some xmas loving I’ll sleep for a few hours then pick up my kid. I’m allowed 6 hours access, but I’m trying not to be bitter. The four of us are going to my mom’s to open the rest of our gifts and have dinner. That was unthinkable a year ago. My mother and I had not spoken in years and for years before that when we did speak it was not very pleasant. Last January ♀ decided she wanted to meet this woman and with her guidance a great deal of healing has taken place. I still can’t bring myself to call her ‘mom’, but my son has a new set of grandparents that adore him and ♀ has a mother & father in-law that think she’s wonderful. And I’m not dreading going over there today.

The post ‘Tell me a Christmas Story‘ was a real event and ♀ encouraged me to send it to my mother. ♀ warned her it was coming and during the next couple of weeks several emails were exchanged. You can’t imagine the relief. I’ve carried that around with me for 28 years and I actually felt like I could start to let it go. I really do have an amazing wife.

The following is an editted email from my mother:

Like you, I’m glad, especially for the sake of xxx and xxx, that we’ve made so much progress.  We can and do, all thank ♀, without a doubt.  We would like the cousins to see adults treating one and all with care and respect and to have some fun together this holiday season.

I’ll read your story more carefully and slowly, try to recall details and try to discern what is fact, what is fiction and what is erroneous memory.  But, I did want to say immediately that I am horrified and sad that this has been festering away for so many years.  I don’t know why you didn’t talk about it.  Interesting that you decided to break the silence on Mom’s birthday–Nov. 5th.  xxxx was Nov. 3rd.  It’s a gloomy time of year for me

It’s really too bad that your dad isn’t here to help you with this.  The first thing you should know, and I always thought you did know, was that xxxx took some peculiar pleasure in planning his own funeral.  He knew from the beginning that he wasn’t going to make it.  He first felt pain on Labour Day weekend when he came back from a boating trip.  He was 38.  He was told that it was a pulled muscle etc.  But he called me later in Sept to say he feared the worst.  By October when we were all at Mom & Dad’s for Thanksgiving, with xxxx,xxx,xxx,xxxxx, Dad said, “Well, we’re all here together,” and I fell apart and said that we weren’t, as xxxx was awaiting a liver biopsy.   I don’t recall if you  came when they got married, but during one of our visits, he talked with your dad about the scoundrels and costs of fuenral homes and practices (he’d been making calls to funeral providers), and decided he wanted it to be handled by people who loved him.  Your dad got right into it and promised that he would handle it.  He also wanted an autopsy to learn the source of the cancer.  What we didn’t know was that it was going to happen in xxxxxx.  It would have been different at the coast.

So, before xxxx came to xxxxxxx to die, you came down with pneumonia or pleurisy, and missed quite a bit of school.  I remember you on the phone with friends, wanting to plan going to the school dance, and how we didn’t want you to go because you were sick.  I suppose you wanted to get out of the house because you’d been home and we were very stressed–not a lot of fun.  Your sister was failing grade 4, I think your dad was working shifts, I was 33 working at xxxxxxx and worried about xxxx, Mom and Dad.   Anyway, you went, and were suspended.  Did I give you the letter we received from the  school board.  I come across it every now and then.  Anyway, I don’t recall that we cared so much that Mom and Dad knew (in fact we sort of thought that if xxxx weren’t dying it might be good to let them know, because they thought you were perfect, which xxxx and xxxx resented), but we didn’t want them to add worries about you right then.  I’ll have to check the letter to see if our school board meeting was before or after xxxx’s death, but it was awful because we were both grieving, and that was one thing too many to deal with.  Your dad loved xxxx as much as I did.  He thought xxxxx was wonderful.  He also promised to look after xxxxxxx, so there’s that…

When he died Christmas Eve, I was with him in our bed.  He had been hallucinating in the hours before.  We had taken him to the hospital and then brought him home again.  xxxxx was totally traumatised by seeing how wasted xxxx was.  He had gone to a nearby motel and was drinking.  I was worried that Dad would drink, and about Mom’s being able to live through this.  They were sleeping in xxxxxx’s bed but I have no memory of where xxxxx was–downstairs I guess.  xxxxxx was on the living room couch.  I don’t think your dad and I had a bed.   I woke everyone, including you, and told them.  Maybe no one ever slept.  I do remember the unreality of Christmas morning and being zombie-like for a long time after.  I do remember though, the plan to handle the cremation becoming complicated because of the intervening autopsy.  I guess xxxx and your dad thought the body could be picked up in a casket and transported for cremation, at the coast, with the help of friends.  Neither xxxx nor xxxx were able to participate.  I know xxxxxx was determined to honour his promise and proposed that you could help.  I didn’t think you were old enough, and had no idea what was involved.  We discussed this endlessly, but time was pressing for body pick-up as we were to have to have the ashes for the funeral in xxxxxxxx New Year’s Eve.  When it was done, I asked about it, but received no details.  None.  I presumed it was tough, but I’d never heard those sad and terrible details.  I asked if you were okay, and xxxxxx assured me then, and even the year he went to xxxxxxx, that the experience had not caused long-lasting harm.  Did you talk about it with him or anyone?  He never told me a single detail, not even later.  I guess he thought it was a kindness to me.  Of course I’m truly sorry that you went through it.  You shouldn’t have.  And he should have told me that it wasn’t a matter of picking up a casket and taking it to the crematorium.  You should have had post-traumatic stress syndrome counselling.  Maybe you should still.  I can’t be certain that I could have helped you with it then or for a few years after.  I was numb with grief, depression and all sorts of other things.  Likely going to Mexico the next year wasn’t the right idea, but it eased the immediate pain and we wanted you to be happy.  I remember xxxxxxx and I wildly doing a polka type dance at a fiesta, and you laughing and cheering, so it wasn’t completely bad.  Christmas morning was kind of fun, because we’d just bought a few things on the market tour the day before.  We opened them on the balcony and then swam and went body surfing.

Anyway, I sincerely doubt that I was furious about you going to xxxxxxx.  I might even have been relieved that I had one less person to worry about.  I don’t know.   I absolutely do not remember.  If you say you went, I’m sure you did.  It must have been helpful for Mom and Dad.   Do you remember how your dad felt about it?   I hadn’t wanted Mom & Dad to worry.  I was angry about the suspension when I thought you could have been supportive, but as you say, you were 15 and determined to go to the party. I was 33.  None of this can be undone, but it helps to know how you saw it.  I simply don’t remember much of that winter, except that xxxxxx seemed to be always with us, demanding attention.  I lost a lot of hair.  I don’t know if you remember that I had big curly hair.  It fell out by the handful and my eyesight even got worse.  The deaths in my life have been very hands on:  I found xxxxx’s daughter dead in her crib when I was 14 or so, I held xxxx until the end, sat with Dad through his last days and nights and xxxx and I sat with Mom.  And of course I have profound regrets that I didn’t do enough to help xxxx with his mourning and depression–about the death of his little girl, his parachuting accident which ended his career, about xxxx’s death and his divorce.  He took his life on xxxx’s birthday.  None of these tragedies were at a distance.  None of this can be undone.  I guess we all cope or don’t cope differently.  I am sorry that you didn’t get the support you needed after xxxx’s death.  I know, too, that after keeping your contact with your Dad to a minimum, you suffered badly when he died.  I don’t know if it was better for you to be too involved in xxxx’s dath or too distant from your Dad at the time of his.  But I know what it is to regret what can’t be changed, as with xxxx.  I didn’t avoid him.  I knew he was struggling, but I was in the midst of the bar admissions course, so only asked Mom & Dad about him.  I suppose in part I was trying to shock you into getting a grip or making peace with your family, when I came into the bakery last winter.  I was very close to death in the hospital, and still don’t know what the prospects are (who does?), and it made me furious that you would repeat the experience, or perhaps to be more honest, it made me furious that you wouldn’t have a single regret when I kicked the bucket and then who would xxx have, I wondered.  Death was on your mind too, because you said you’d made a provision in your will to ensure I didn’t see xxx or have custody of him.  So, I have no illusions; your hatred runs deep.

On a less serious level, I am surprised by the reference to being sent to camps or xxxxx.  Thsi reminds me of the statement in xxxxxxx’s affidavit about being kicked out of home at a tender age.  I’m perplexed.  You went to xxxxx for two weeks or ten days one summer, and I know you told me that you were frightened and wondered why I had sent you there, but that it was worthwhile in the end.    It was when I was making decent money and could afford to send you.  Were there others?  xxxx went to several camps involving horses.   In your memory it’s all about me; as though your dad was not a factor in any of the events or decisions.  You did go to xxxxxxx during holidays when it was appropriate.  I didn’t know you saw that as my rejection.  I thought you liked to do it.  I’d stayed with my brother, xxxxxx had always come to us, and even later you went to xxxxxxx, and one year xxxxx did, too.  It seemed a family tradition.  We helped each other out that way.   It’s sad that you remember not being with us, rather than all the family holidays, the cabin years, the camping and fishing trips, the family events.  In light of how selective our respective memories are, when I hear you say re the litigation, “At least xxx will know that I tried”, I have to caution you that despite what you may think have been good times, he may not remember or appreciate anything at all.  I keep wondering why, instead of indoor pools and daycare, you and xxx don’t travel, go skiing, sleigh riding, camping, borrow our boat or canoe, go fishing, head out into the bush as we did with you, but maybe none of that matters in the end.  It all seems forgotten.  xxxx’s kids are the same.  He’s always pointing out lakes and trails and campsites he took them to.  So, he’s got losses and disappointments to deal with, too.

Anyway, as I told ♀, we’ve struggled through many Christmases since then, with one of the best being my first with xxxxx, who has saved and healed me in so many ways.  And yes, Amazing Grace is hard to hear and it was years before I could bear to go to xxxxxxx without crying.  Every Christmas since ’78 has been different and a challenge to keep my spirits up, as it has been for you.  Because you never talked about the Christmas xxxx died, I always thought that your negative attitude toward the season was about the bakery, your Dad and I divorcing, your dislike of working in retail , and often thought you were very self-focused and should have given a thought to how you might help me get through it, without my brothers and then my parents, and then even without xxxx and xxxx, which blew up over me defending you.  And you may not understand this, but I also miss your dad and remember the many funny and wonderful and exasperating things he did at this time of year.  Remember the piano delivery year, and the Cat House sign?  So, I sincerely appreciate learning 28 years later, what has been eating away at you.  You simply had nothing to give and I do understand that depression isn’t an easy thing to simply turn off.    I hope you can forgive me for my role or short-comings at that sad time, and as you say, let go of some of that.   I am sorry that there is no one else left for you to consult with but to the extent of my probably flawed memory that was how the Christmas of ’78 unfolded.  I hope this one is better.

Cheers,

Mom

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