Christmas looks different this year.
Blinking lights on IV poles not twinkling tree lights. The mechanized roar of blood pressure cuffs and sequential compression cuffs inflating and deflating not jingle bells. Chatter all along the hospital corridor and incessant beeps not Christmas carols.
I’m sitting my second shift at my mother-in-law’s bedside. She fell in the parking lot of an urgent care clinic the Saturday before Christmas, where my sister-in-law was taking her because of significant swelling in her feet.
An ambulance was dispatched. Emergency room doc determined her left femur was broken. Surgery was scheduled to put a pin in the thing. Turned out she also needed a pacemaker as a heart blockage was causing a low heart rate which caused the fluid build up in her feet.
I hate cancer with a white-hot passion as most everyone knows. Heart-related shit is a close second.
Surgery for the pin happened last Sunday, the pacemaker was implanted on Tuesday. At some point Ruth will be moved to a rehab facility to work on regaining her mobility. Maybe tomorrow.
Meantime, Christmas is different. The traditional Christmas Eve pizza party, Christmas morning breakfast, the opening of the cornucopia of gifts under the tree, and snacking throughout Christmas day — that whole schedule changed.
As often happens in life, what’s normal changed on a dime.
Ruth worries that she ruined Christmas, as if she broke her femur intentionally. Christmas is bound by neither the calendar nor geography. We can celebrate as a family when she’s sprung from rehab.
It’s Christmas morn and the lovely Sarah just left from sitting the overnight shift as she’s done every night since the fall. Hopefully she’ll get a bit of sleep before we commence a make-do Christmas gathering.
I spent the afternoon here yesterday, just as I am today. I love my mother-in-law, so I’m glad to be here, and we’ve had some lovely conversations.
I have to admit, though, that in this the year of our Lord 2022 I’m achingly tired of hospital hallways, waiting rooms and sitting bedside.
My heart was already feeling the weight of loss for my mom this holiday season. Jim Lehman, the second love of my mom’s life, passed unexpectedly in August. December, while joyous to the rest of the world, has been somewhat muted in my family since 1990. My dad, mom’s first love, died 17 days before Christmas. We celebrated, but I don’t recall any of it as the suck of grief was as heavy as snow on boughs of holly.
I expect we did then what we’re doing this year: having the merriest Christmas possible.
Last night, Sarah and I celebrated Christmas Eve together over burgers and fries in the hospital cafeteria. It was the first time we’d spent more than 10 minutes together in the same place in over a week. We made a plan to spend some time, maybe a couple hours, together tonight. Maybe watch White Christmas. After the impromptu family gathering.
In the cafeteria last night, other families were doing what Sarah and I did, albeit with takeout from the Olive Garden or some such. One quite festively dressed group came to spend dinner time with a family member on the medical staff of the hospital.
“This is not how I expected to celebrate Christmas,” Ruth has said more than once.
We know.
In the not so distant past, she dazzled the family with Christmas day dinner and a variety of snacks, like her famous cheese ball and batches of sausage balls. The house beautifully decorated. This is a woman who even now cannot pass by a Christmas decor store without stopping to see what might get added to the tree this year.
Ruth is renowned as an amazing cook and baker. Coconut cake, chocolate lush, eclair cake. All amazing. At Thanksgiving, hers is the only pumpkin pie I want to eat. Ruth’s is a simple recipe scratched down on a worn and yellowed recipe card, but there’s some magic to hers that no one else can duplicate. Others have tried and failed. If Ruth didn’t bake it, I don’t want it. Maybe I’ll take a stab at the recipe this year.
As I write this Ruth is sleeping, the pain pill having kicked in. The nurses are in the hallway, tending to the needs of their patients. As if we don’t show enough appreciation to nurses, and I daresay we don’t, they’re here working Christmas, along with the doctors, pharmacists, nurses’ aides and all of the other personnel who make a hospital run without regard to the turning of the calendar.
Ruth’s nurse, Susan, is working all the holidays this year. She gets time-and-a-half pay for working holidays. She told us that she and her husband had a small celebration with longtime friends last night.
They celebrated the merriest Christmas possible.
I know a number of people grieving loss of loved ones this season. Others, my brothers and sisters in cancerland, are in the midst of treatment and scheduling holiday gatherings around treatment dates and times, or the impacts of side effects that might keep them from enjoying family gatherings. The halfway point of my own chemotherapy journey took place the day after Christmas, which meant cutting our time with family short.
These moments make more evident than others what really matters in life. Gifts under the tree are frivolous, really. Most of us can make a meal out of whatever we have on hand, or whatever is on the menu. The trimmings and trappings aren’t the important part of the holiday.
Not by the longest shot.
“Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! ‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas … perhaps … means a little bit more!’”
“Christmas Day is in our grasp so long as we have hands to clasp,” wrote Dr. Seuss.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”
That something was love.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17, and 16 doesn’t mean a hill of beans without 17 so let’s all stop reciting the one without the other. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.)
I pray you have love in your life, and may you experience the merriest Christmas possible.
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