Christmas was an amazing experience as a child. My sister and I were fortunate to have a mother who created magical Christmases year after year and a father patient enough to help her to do it. Family was so important to her that, I believe, even after my sister and I were adults, she had generated so much momentum over so many years that Christmas at home without the benefit of Santa and the other childhood fictions still remained special every year. We were lucky.
My mother died of cancer over two decades ago in early October, and I can’t recall what we did during Christmas of that year. I can’t imagine my father, sister and I did anything. We may have put up a tree and given each other presents, but I don’t expect our hearts would have been in it. The possibility of betraying her memory by celebrating Christmas or betraying her memory by not celebrating Christmas would have cancelled each other out and left us with nothing. In fact, I don’t remember any Christmas after my mother died until the one five years later, when my father died of cancer on Christmas Eve.
We had a tree that year. My father insisted on it. We held up well, my sister and I, caring for him at home, uncertain whether he would live to see Christmas or possibly make it into the New Year. Presents found their way beneath the tree; I’m not sure to this day how he managed to arrange that. But he had wanted a last Christmas, whether he could participate in it or not. He didn’t live to see Christmas Day, in the end, but I believe he shared in every one of the days we had the Christmas tree standing, decorated and lit, in the corner of the room where it had always been, the same (or as near as we could make it to) when our mother had been there, too. It was as close as any of us would ever feel to being a whole family again, and it must have been the most comforting way for him to leave us.
We sold the house afterwards, and I kept nothing to remind me of so many childhood Christmases. I turned my back on the holiday and the season. I travelled far away to live and work in distant places; I married and had children and had Christmases completely unlike those I had as a child. We never created (or I never recreated) for my own children any of the magic my mother had created, and I felt a hollow sadness at that time of the year every year. Every Christmas would be like that for me until I was diagnosed with cancer.
It was the middle of summer when I learned I had cancer, and treatment began in August. By the time my treatment was completed, it was already late November. It would be after Christmas before I could have an MRI and know whether the treatment had worked and the cancer was gone. I chose to postpone it another week and wait for the beginning of the New Year. It would have to be a better year.
That was the first Christmas in many years that would mean something. It was a Christmas full of relief – relief to find myself still alive, to have completed the treatment, to reach the finish line of so many races combined into one. When you beat cancer, you never just beat the disease alone but you survive the treatment itself and everything that goes with the bundle: the contraindications, complications, consequences, expected and unexpected, of the disease and the treatment, different for every cancer and every person suffering from it. Having such a race finish during Christmas changed Christmas for me again. It gave that first Christmas a new meaning, and every Christmas since has more meaning, because every Christmas since can’t be one I expected; you know now they are never guaranteed.
We have had three Christmases – that first after my treatment, a second spectacular one in Switzerland, and a quiet but homey one in the Lake District last year. This year, Christmas was in New York. Wherever we are and whether we have presents or not, we remember the misery of hard Christmases and the magic of childhood Christmases, but the ones we live to see are the ones that mean the most to us. Let’s be happy and healthy and live to see many more.
