I woke this morning first to the thought that it’s Christmas Day. As most of us who honor or celebrate it probably do.
My next thought was of my father, who died on Christmas Eve, 1994. He enters my mind earlier in the season and on Christmas Eve, of course, but it is on Christmas Day that I always have the mental memorial. Maybe it’s because on that Christmas Day, with the house decorated, a Christmas tree where it had always stood every year, my sister and I had passed the day with a strange detachment, as if we were ghosts ourselves in surroundings beyond our touch, faced with all of the trappings of the ritual but the meaning erased: our first day of orphanhood.
We weren’t close, my father and I, but as the first-born (my sister is five-years younger), and since our mother had died five years earlier, I was there at home with him during his final days.
His bedroom was on the ground floor. I slept on the sofa to be near so I could hear him during the night. What little sleep I got was light, restless, tentative. I was alert to his suffering and his life ebbing faster each day. I also wanted to do the most I could to shield my sister from the worst of it. She was closer to him. It was always better if I went to him first and best if she didn’t enter his bedroom at all. She had done the same for me when we lost our mother.
The instant I woke on Christmas Eve, I knew. My eyes opened to winter-pale morning light in the windows, and the silence told me. I was struck by the utter stillness and, at the same time, by how deeply I had slept. After so many nights of fitful sleep, so much sleep all at once had addled me. I struggled to wake fully. The idea of some intent on my father’s part crept into my erratic thoughts; the notion that he wanted to depart without disturbance, to slip away unseen, lodged itself in my head and remains there to this day.
The realization that my sister might wake and come downstairs urged me off the sofa. I shuffled with soft solemnity into my father’s room and met what I had expected. No light remained in his eyes; his slack open mouth outlined the distortion of death. He had escaped during the night the hideous pain of his terminal cancer. The particulars to be sorted lay ahead while immediate memories of the most recent arduous days lingered vividly, intermingled with the relief that his pain and his passing were behind him.
My father was not an easy man. His final words to me a day earlier had done more harm perhaps than good. But I fulfilled a duty I felt I owed him and listened to a conscience that urged me to protect my sister from as much of it as I could. Other than that, I was still the same self-centered and self-absorbed man I had always been. After the hastily arranged funeral, I left the state to return to work and a life led far away.
It would be many years later when the day came that I looked into a mirror and for the first time saw my father. I don’t recall when exactly that was or where I was, but I remember clearly the shock. I had aged all of a sudden and the aging exposed his physical features as if they had always been there, dormant beneath the surface. These now visible and unmistakable traits coincided with the discovery that, no matter how much in him I abhorred, I had become (or had always been) the same man. Maybe not exactly the same, but close enough to reveal my own selfishness and accept the harm it did to others.
Then I recalled the Turkish man who had bought me soup in the dining car of a Polish train headed to Warsaw. It’s been a long time since I last thought of him. But even though it was thirty-five years ago, the memory of his kindness remains clear.
I had departed Paris the evening before without having eaten dinner and didn’t make it to the dining car until after the train had crossed the Polish border. Hungry, I hoped to pay with whatever currency I had, but it was only possible to pay with zloty. The Turkish man standing at the counter beside me told the attendant he would pay and showed the man a thick fold of Polish notes. He was on his way home from visiting his parents in Germany; his Polish wife and young daughter waited for him in Lodz. I had not traveled much outside the US before, and a complete stranger had never before showed me such kindness. There was no way to repay him. It was my first encounter with paying it forward.
Which reminded me of the time I had a flat tire at night in a torrential downpour on a desolate road between Dover and South London. I pulled off on a narrow shoulder and began the whole miserable process with the jack and tire iron while being pelted with rain. A flash of headlights from an approaching car prompted me to imagine being drenched as it passed – or struck.
The car stopped. A young man appeared at my side, made a swift assessment, and offered a comment that was polite but decisive. The next thing I knew, he had the tire iron in his hand and the jack better positioned to lift the wheel from the road. He worked with amazing speed, with the agility of someone who changed tires for a living, while I did what I could to assist. Within a few minutes, we had the spare mounted, and after the wheel was lowered back on the road, he gave each bolt a final crank. I thanked him and offered to pay, but he adamantly refused. We shook hands, and he disappeared back to his car and onto the road.
My mind has the tendency to wander pretty far afield most days. Yet, when random thoughts materialize, I suspect there’s a reason. I can’t help but search for links. Not for supernatural explanations but – hopefully – for subconscious meaning.
I received an unexpected and very thoughtful Christmas gift from a new friend yesterday. We met for breakfast in a nearby café. The thought of exchanging presents had never occurred to me. We’re distant neighbors, both of us Americans living in Austria, and our relationship has warmed in the last couple of months to a real friendship. But the idea of a Christmas present had never entered my mind. It plunged me into that same self-loathing first revealed in the mirror when I saw my father in myself.
I picked up the tab. It was the least I could do. Not only to thank her for the wonderful books she had chosen so well for me, but for the lesson.
Christmas Day after our father died, my sister and I finally agreed in the evening to sit on the floor beside the tree as we had done when we were children and open the presents. It had become a burden that had hung over us the entire day. Every time one of us mentioned it, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. But we did in the end only because, if we didn’t, we would face the same again the next day.
We began slowly to unwrap the boxes, weakly and reluctantly scraping away the tape and pulling off the paper. I asked her when she had done all of the shopping, but she said our father had done most of it. When I asked her how that was possible, she said he had done it weeks ago, planning ahead, she thought, which silenced us for a moment. We stopped unwrapping. She explained that he’d been much stronger, that he had deteriorated rapidly afterwards. But, then, while he still had strength to drive, he had done the Christmas shopping and wrapped everything himself.
In the box I opened were two white long-sleeved button shirts in the correct size.
“Dad said you would need those for your new job,” my sister said.
The company where I worked had made me permanent two or three months earlier.
Sometimes the need is obvious, easily observed – a hungry man on a train in a foreign land or stranded and struggling on a roadside late at night – or it is intuited – recently divorced and desperate for the distraction of good books or recently employed and not yet able to fund the essential wardrobe. In both cases, there is a something that compels the giver to give. And that something is apparent only in the moment when you take that person’s hand and offer sincere and heartfelt thanks, when you experience the curious warmth of having a friend who seems to have read your mind when choosing a gift for you, when the Christmas present you open triggers a connection you never believed existed.
I wondered what my father was thinking – knowing this was his last Christmas, knowing that he clothed his son in a future he would never see – when he chose the shirts, paid for them, wrapped them. My sister was crying. I looked again at the name card where he had written Love, Dad.
There are things I have done for other people throughout my life. Most of these things have been for my children (now grown) or my wives. I tried to be generous to people I knew at work. I try now to be mindful of what I can do for others. But it is never enough.
Christmas should remind us of what we can do for others. It should be asking us at the end of each year, at the time when the deepest depth of winter is behind us and longer and warmer days lie ahead, how much was done for others during the course of the year? And how much can we do in the next one? Christmas should stand as the symbol for regularly giving a part of ourselves with honest intent to all living things and to celebrate that giving on this day (and Boxing Day, too).
Looking at it in this way reveals how much work there is for me to do in 2024. But this unexpected gift is a powerful lesson. If we all looked at it in the same way, imagine how much there would be to celebrate next Christmas.