It’s Fifty Years Now Since I Experienced Every Emotion On Christmas Day

And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone… There’ll be one child born…. In our world, to carry on, carry on (And When I Die, written by Laura Nyro and popularized by Blood, Sweat and Tears)

The death of a loved one hits and hits hard no matter when it happens.  It can be even more so if it’s on an important day. A birthday (your own or their’s). An anniversary.  Mother’s Day if it’s your mom or Father’s Day if it’s your dad. Thanksgiving. And yes, Christmas. It might seem particularly cruel but death is part of life, and every time a life ends another is just being born. It happens everywhere, every single day. Just like you see in the title picture.  Both death and birth require changes for people affected either way, and not all of them are easy. In fact some are damned tough but adjustments in outlook and living life get made. I’m writing this not to make you sad, but through my own story to give you hope. And maybe help you personally, or help you to a better way of understanding and helping others who might have to start processing their grief at a time they’d hoped to be experiencing joy.

Fifty years ago I had a Christmas unlike any other. One came close many years later but 1975 was something that can happen only once. The death of my mom. The most influential person in my life.  That day brought an extraordinary, emotional, astonishing mashup of grief and hope. I’ve told the story here on Politizoom before (and DK before that) this week it’s a half century since I went through gut wrenching grief and renewal of spirit and hope in the space of a half hour.

I ceased being a person of faith decades ago but have still continued to celebrate Christmas, in large part due to my mom. Once it was time to leave the small, 60 bed hospital we waited as a family for the elevators (slower than the second coming of Christ) in the second floor lobby I noticed a handful of people next to the door of the nursery. Through my tears I saw a young women who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me come out and hand a newborn baby to the father. Who then passed it to both sets of their parents. My family had just said goodbye, and found ourselves next to a father and grandparents saying hello to the newest member of THEIR family.

Think about that, and tell me it wasn’t a sign from God, the universe, karma or whatever you believe in. During the few months from when her lung cancer was diagnosed mom did her best to prepare me for the fact she’d be gone soon. But that I had a life ahead and would need to accept two things: First that she’d taught me what she believed I needed to know, and second that it was okay to be sad but more important to move on and live. Her favorite saying was a quote from Auntie Mame. “Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.” She reminded me of that, and that she’d tried to feast on life (she did btw) and that I should too.  I didn’t quite get it in that lobby waiting for the elevator but I quickly came to realize, seeing that young woman introduce her baby to her husband  and its grandparents was the world teaching me that lesson from my mom. I DID in the moment get the symmetry and how mom would have loved it.

One family saying goodbye to someone we loved so deeply, yet another family was introduced to their own brand new loved one. Two families five or six feet apart. One in the throes of grief and crying, the other experiencing a special form of Christmas Joy and smiling. Tears of sorrow and tears of happiness. I nudged a family friend and his wife who’d arrived at the hospital just before mom took her last breath. Later they too would admit to the same feelings I had, and one mentioned that song I’ve noted.

The symmetry of the moment that struck me then still evokes the same powerful reminder that while all things come to an end, they become replaced by new things. One person dies, and another is born. Every day. Often in the very same hospital although in that small a hospital in a small southern Illinois town the odds against what took place early afternoon of Christmas 1975 at St. Joseph’s hospital had to be long. Being a person of faith at the time I couldn’t help but feel that although her body had succumbed to the cancer, mom’s soul refused to head up to heaven right away.  Being agnostic I don’t believe in a deity or heaven and hell. However I’m open to the concept of karma. As a senior citizen now I’ve seen enough things that sure seem like karma is out there – some sort of life energy that manifests in people and events.

But back then I believed in God. And heaven and had an unshakable belief that if my mom couldn’t get in there was something very wrong with the whole concept. What matters that I’m trying to communicate is that on that day I believed mom somehow hovered above us, engineering that moment. A reminder of the final part of the version of And When I Die that the band Blood, Sweat and Tears she liked had made popular. and she loved. She wasn’t afraid of dying although being a month shy of her 48^th birthday and full of life (she was one of those people of whom you say if they are 90 when they die they’ll still be in the prime of their life) I know she regretted the things she wouldn’t get to see. It’s something we talked about in fact, as she prepared the 18 year old version of me for the fact I’d have to depend on what she’d managed to teach me.

I’ve tried to live to be the person she hoped I’d be. I’m sure there are things I’ve done that would have gotten me that “mom look” most of us have experienced that made us feel about two feet tall. Even been in the doghouse until I did all I could to make amends. On the balance though I’ve tried to live a life where service to others, helping out when I could even if only able to in a small way, but something through jobs I’ve held would have made her proud. I sometimes worried I hadn’t done enough when she was still alive to set a good example. Growing up such things sound good in theory but teenagers are…. Well teenagers. It was only about five years ago when the younger brother of a former (he’s full blown Trump) got my phone number and called me that I learned I’d done more than I knew. Yes, I’d done some volunteer work but I was stunned to learn Danny and other young guys would watch from his bedroom window as I practiced basketball hour after hour. I wasn’t naturally gifted and two growth spurts had made me clumsy until I was past my freshman year in highs school.

It’s not like my dad didn’t have something to do with it, but things went bad between him and mom by the time I was eight and she’s the one who mostly raised me. (He slept apart from her and wasn’t around the house much.) That work ethic to grind it out to become good at tasks was mostly her doing. I didn’t even realize it had been instilled in me!  That is just one of many gifts she bestowed. I’d come to learn it had a ripple effect. I’d do other things during my life that I was sure would last. Sometimes I’d learn I’d made a positive effect without knowing I’d done so. One was from back before mom died in fact!  Mom managed to pack a lot into me in those 18 years she lived after I was born.

She was also a Christmas freak. Like many depression era parents she (and dad) were obsessed with making sure even if it meant breaking up packages of underwear and socks to wrap individual sets there were tons of presents under the tree. By the time everything was opened  you couldn’t see the floor for all the wrapping paper!  She decorated the hell out of our house. And baked. Boy did she bake!

She had a gift for it in fact and would make money by making baked goods, including some awesomely decorated birthday and wedding cakes. So she made sheet after sheet of cookies and it was loads of fun decorating them with icing, sprinkles and so on. She baked pies and cakes for other people. And so many looked forward to her dropping off a Stollen at their house!  ALL of it from scratch. The next year, 1976 a lot of people would stop me on the street to wish me well, and wistfully say it wasn’t the same without mom dropping off something she’d baked for them. I barely knew so many of them!

In mid December when mom told me it was time to take her to the hospital (we’d set up an amateur version of a Hospice in the breakfast nook) she didn’t have to say the words. I walked her around the house and the decorations we’d managed to put up (and the tree of course) so she could have one last, lingering look. Like I said, we both knew she wouldn’t be coming home this time. I’d come to realize in time she thought her best chance to make it to one last Christmas was with proper round the clock hospital care. Those last few days were increasingly difficult to the point of brutal. By the 24^th she seemed to have lost consciousness. She struggled mightily to take in each breath and by the time I went to church for Christmas Eve service the time between each breath had grown to the point we wondered if there would be another.

The nurses said she’d likely make it through another day but if her blood pressure dropped to a certain point on Christmas that would be the end. I slept at home for the first time since she’d gone to the hospital and woke to the phone ringing. The news was what I expected – it was almost over. The sun was up and the snow was coming down hard at I drove out there. It turned out to be an epic White Christmas.

By mid-morning over a foot had fallen and there were no signs it was stopping. We’d lean down to mom’s ear to describe it to her and I swear a couple of time the grunts we’d gotten used to after she’d lost consciousness (we believed) were an acknowledgement she understood. I could even swear there was an ever so slight smile at one point. But just after one in the afternoon she took in that last breath. By then the snow had finally stopped but there was at least a foot and a half. However the town snowplows kept Main street and 14^th street, a half block from our house passable. State snowplows managed to do the same with the road that ran from Main street on the east edge of town north and beyond so Bill was able to come from the funeral home to the hospital as soon as the nurses called him.

He waited in the room (like his older brother Gene he knew and loved mom) as we gathered ourselves, in turn kissed her on the forehead and made out way into the hall. From there, a nurse guided our group which could barely see though out tears to the second floor lobby and I guess pushed the elevator button.  Earlier in the morning I’d headed down to the coffee shop and glance at the four by six foot window into the nursery. No babies. What I didn’t know that there was a woman in labor.  For you younger folks, in 1975 dads and/or others seldom were with women when they delivered babies. It was nurses and doctors. And in nurseries themselves male doctors were barely tolerated.

No male was allowed through that door unless they were a doctor.  That’s just how things were back then. (For younger folks who don’t believe me just ask senior citizens you know) Hence as we held vigil in mom’s room, andother family sat in the waiting room across from the elevators until the baby was born and mom and baby were safely in the nursery. All this was going on in the hour before mom died. And led to that bittersweet but most beautiful moment I’ve experienced in this life.

The last thing I do every Christmas before going to bed is watch the movie Scrooged. (all the way through the closing credits followed by that epic rendition of Jackie DeShannon’s Put A Little Love In Your Heart.)  Bill Murray’s character gives a moving, inspiring talk about the Christmas Miracle and how he finally “gets it.” I agree with all he says but there’s one part missing. I wouldn’t hear the sermon that makes me say that until my last Christmas Eve service at the Presbyterian church I grew up in, delivered by our youngish pastor only five years or so older than me and who was a golf buddy.  I was 26 and after the first of the year would head off to become a United States Marine.

Mark started with a simple thought – how the birth of a child could one day impact the world. He took us to the year 1809 and noted a number of influential people h ad been born that year. (Here’s a list – Wow!  Celebrities Born in 1809 | Famous Birthdays )  He cited three names: Tennyson, Gladstone, and after a pause Illinois’ own Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln got particular note because his own birth was as unnoticed and humble as the Savior whose birth we were gathered to celebrate. Yet from the humblest of beginnings Lincoln would overcome poverty, lack of formal education and depression (an aspect of his life not many know much about) to learn the law, become a reasonably successful lawyer and then a politician. One who despite so many failures became President and through force of will held a nation bent on tearing itself apart together. Then Mark cited all we had done afterwards despite our faults. The point he closed his sermon with was that something as simple as the birth of a child could lead to impacts that led to a life that can alter history.

It was then that it fully hit me that what I already knew was a powerful moment in my still young life would affect me until my own dying day.  I’ve tried as best I can her, but in my heart it’s more profound to me than I can put into words. After dad died in 1980 I wound up working in the funeral home that buried both my parents (dad in 1980, as well as “Granny”, my dad’s mother who loved my mom more I believe than her actual daughter – my dad’s sister. Later on I’d work at a cemetery, again helping families through the difficult process of burying a loved one, and following up for varying amounts of time afterwards. Whether Christmas or some other significant day for them and a departed loved one sometimes it’s especially tough. I’d share my own story, and I can honestly say it always seemed to help.

So in this long, long piece if you want to know why I went into all this now you know. Do I feel a bit pensive in the early afternoon each Christmas?  Yes. However what I think of most is the symmetry of that moment fifty  years ago. Again I  can assure you my mom would have loved it. And I can tell you everyone who knew her and who I talked about it with would back me up on that. Death is a natural part of life. We all will die. But someone will be born to replace us. And who knows? They might accomplish astonishing things we never even dreamed of.

I’ve often wondered about that child I saw introduced to it’s father and grandparents. I didn’t recognize any of them so they were probably from one of the hamlets west of town in what we called “The Bottoms.” A swath of lowlands alongside the Mississippi River. I could if I wanted to find out that child’s name. Even perhaps how their life and that of their parents and grandparents turned out. I’ve chosen not to. I’d rather do what I’m sure my mom would say – just imagine the good possibilities. That is the renewal of hope I experience every Christmas. I hope if you’ve read this you come away with the same hope.

Merry Christmas. Be safe, and savor every warm memory you make In this holiday season. And best wishes to you in the year to come.

Support the site with a subscription today and see no more ads!

Go Ad-free Now!