Christmas Present~

I’ve always been violently opposed to the adage that good things come in small packages; or at least that was so when I was a child. I knew a lot about the tricks adults could play on children and figured that axiom was just another. Eventually I recognized that those little blue Tiffany boxes could hold some pretty nice things. Still, there’s no doubt they weren’t part of Santa’s inventory when I was little. But age has a way of moving all those preferences around, and I eventually developed an allergy to the contents of even those little blue boxes. Now I’ve reached a point where not only is less more and small better than big, but ‘nothing’ is actually more desirable than ‘something’. I can’t stand stuff anymore.

So as you can imagine, I’ve become quite a challenge when it comes to my birthday or Christmas presents. Luckily, my sons feel as I do and are very comfortable rejecting the gift-giving traditions where I’m concerned. Although I must say it took a few years of practice before we all got it right. Waves of guilt and embarrassment seemed to wash over us at different times and we’d find ourselves buying backup gifts, ‘just in case’. But I felt that this year we’d probably mastered the art of restraint, and indeed I was right. Recovering from the shock of our first Christmas without my husband and their father, we were all relieved by the fact that we didn’t have to join in with those others who are still caught and held fast by the obligations that bind.

This year my older son returned with his girlfriend for a brief stay with me in New York, wisely package-free, as was I. There were actually no holiday decorations in the apartment, which nonetheless looked very nice as it always does. We were all heading up to Vermont for some skiing if there was snow, or fresh air if the precipitation hadn’t frozen enough in the atmosphere to produce the desired white crystals. I was in fact delighted to find there were no packages peeking out of their luggage since I, too, had honored the agreement.

We had only half a day to be in the city before starting off on our trek to New England, and fate delivered a blow at the eleventh hour just to see if we were able to play the game, I guess. Condensing events of the next few days until only the essence remains, my son ended up sitting in a New York City hospital waiting room with his girlfriend instead of a charming ‘farm-to-table’ restaurant in Vermont.  We all spent Christmas Eve and Day learning that I had thankfully not had a heart attack, but had a virus that attacked the pericardium around my heart, causing an inflammation (termed Pericarditis) that was horribly painful and frightening before it was diagnosed. The irony of having an inflamed, or infected heart as the doctor put it, didn’t escape me. Everyone had warned me and the entire family of how difficult the first Christmas would be after my husband’s death, especially since his true battle started at Christmas last year. But no one could have known that there would be severe physical challenges again as well as emotional ones.

There were many ironies in addition to the ‘inflamed heart’, as it turned out, but just as last year, my son and his girlfriend turned into the true family they are. I can’t think of how I would have survived this Christmas, either emotionally or physically, had they not been with me. After I realized I was going to live and wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life, or even the remainder of the week with the pain I’d been experiencing, I found I had the strength to be grateful for all the wonders I’ve been given. The viral attack was certainly no fun and was frightening as well as debilitating. But my son left me feeling more confident than I have in a long while. Was it the fact that he was there when I needed him? Or the truth that he cared enough to make me feel there was no place else he’d rather be? We fought hard together through my husband’s illness, and I felt the same solidarity this Christmas, even though he desperately needed a holiday and my scare was certainly ruining it.

But as I watched him and his girlfriend watching and waiting for me this year in the hospital waiting rooms, I realized I wasn’t that same cohort who’d fought beside him last Christmas in a different hospital. I wasn’t even the same person I’d been before that last battle we were set up to lose a year ago—his mother and someone else’s wife. It seems that was part of my problem. Changing the dynamics of my life completely with someone who’d ‘left the room’ had made me someone else. I’d lost the person I thought I was, a vanishing act that left me groping around nervously for some anchoring landmark to plot my course by before shoving off for new shores.

So now my son’s returned to his ‘real’ life a continent away, and although the silence around the apartment was initially deafening and I miss him and his girlfriend specifically, I realize they slipped in the best Christmas present I’ve ever had even though I didn’t know it until after they’d left.  They gave me back a little piece of my old self, that necessary grounding landmark, by giving me so much of themselves without needing anything from me. Looking back on this Christmas, I’m tempted to say it was particularly wonderful and that the best things don’t come in packages at all. I also hope they’re the things I keep getting, and possibly giving, year after year.