Christmas 2020

For a while last week, I thought I had a poignant Christmas essay in my sights, full of pathos. With then and now, youth and old age, family and loneliness. Then, it melted away. It was forming up around Christmas 1967, which was the Christmas before my mother died. I spent the holiday at the Naval Hospital in Charleston; she died in February. But then I realized the last Christmas I spent away from home and family, was 1968. I was at Quantico, Virginia, and I met my wife the following year. So, goodbye pathos.

The loneliness crept in because this will be the first Christmas I spend without my wife at my side since 1969, and with Covid-19 in the air, I’m staying home. But, my youngest son, lives with me, so I’m not bereft of family, and my other two children may make socially distanced day trips up to see me. So, while surely it will be different, it will not be altogether lonely. Sad, sure. And maybe that’s where the pathos creeps back in, but no one really wants pity, especially at Christmas, and we’ve already had two of them where the wife and mother was missing in mind if not body.

It looks as though this Christmas is simply shaping up to be the period at the end of the last sentence in the last paragraph of the longest chapter in my life. Perhaps this is where a childhood of moving from town to town stands me in good stead, because I learned early on that loss is an essential part of life and that the future is there to be faced. Sure, my mother, father, youngest brother, and now wife may be gone, but the living are here, with lives to be lived, and they should be celebrated, because Christmas is about a birthday and the promise of salvation.