Blue Christmas Past

“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!” screams the blocky black letters on a refrigerator magnet that my sister gave me for Christmas six years ago. The jokey rescripting of Browning’s “Grow old along with me/the best is yet to be,” never failed to make me laugh, and yet its message was too bleak to face every time I fetched milk for my morning coffee.

Tucked away on an upper shelf beside other miscellaneous objects that can neither be given away nor used—a jumbo Santa mug, a beeswax angel candle--the four-inch-square magnet summons up, intense as Proust’s Madeline, my mother’s last Christmas.

My mother was 79 then, what gerontologists call the “young old” as opposed to the “old old.” Even though there was every reason to think she would see several more Christmases, she was overweight, suffering from high blood pressure as well as Type II Diabetes. She had also started to experience memory slips, calling me from the roadside motel near our Vermont home and asking how long she would be staying and when I would be picking her up for dinner, details we had gone over minutes before, when I had dropped her off.

Such confusion was more typical of my mother-in-law, who was also with us in that year, sleeping in the guest room because we couldn’t trust her to be on her own. My mother-in-law had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago and her short-term memory was shot. She would ask you whether the traffic was bad, and regardless of whether you said it was heavy or light, whether you described the ten-car pile-up that slowed cars for hours on the interstate or the ease with which you breezed through the tollbooths, she would ask you, ten minutes later, whether the traffic was bad.

Being with her made me feel as nutty as Alice deciphering the messages of the Cheshire Cat, and the only way I could bear it was to remind myself that my own mother still possessed all of her marbles, and that therefore I myself stood a good chance of looking at eighty with most of my cerebral parts still in good working order. To think otherwise was to enter a wintry-mix region where every thought shape-shifted into something paler than itself, where your mind steps grew heavy with snowfall, and you were Gretel without Hansel, deep in the forest, with no way home.

My ten-year-old son was thrilled to be hosting his two grandmothers—“I’ve got both my grandmothers for Christmas this year,” he announced to his friends, as if this constituted some sort of familial lunar eclipse. I tried to be of equally buoyant good cheer, helping my husband haul the Christmas tree on a sled from the tree farm down the road, a yuletide ritual that always made me feel like we had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell print, never mind that we could never agree on which tree to cut down. I bought up a storm of stocking stuffers and stayed up past midnight baking cutout reindeer cookies, holiday fruit bread and all manner of high-caloric treats that no one, save our blooming boy with his bean-sprouting limbs, had any business eating.

Holidays can secrete more conflicts than dried-out evergreens can drop needles. But before I elucidate the dramas of this particular Christmas past, I should point out that if my mother were alive and reading this blog, she would object to my use of the word “blue.” Unlike the narrator of “Blue Christmas,” that bit of holiday treacle rendered by every pop singer from Elvis Presley to Bon Jovi and dogging the weary shopper like winter flu down the aisles of Target to Toys ‘R Us, my mother was not alone. Not that there hadn’t been other Christmases where she had slept late in her bungalow in Venice, Florida, her only companions an army of Poinsettia plants stationed on the front and back decks, but this year we were decking the halls and singing joy to the world.

But why I was being such a pill? Why wouldn’t I do what she asked? We were sitting in the car in the Grand Union parking lot, arguing like Jesus, Mary, and Joseph about whether I would pick up a bag of Fritos.

“You know you’re not supposed to eat that garbage. Do you want to end up blind and crippled like Betty?” Betty was my mother’s older sister who had spent seven years in a nursing home, having lost both eyes and her left foot to the ravages of diabetes.

“Don’t talk drivel. I’m hungry, for heaven’s sakes. I haven’t eaten since lunchtime.”

“How about if I get you something healthy, like trail mix.”

“I don’t want trail mix. I want Fritos. Here, I’ll give you el dinero.” She waved a ten-dollar bill in my face.

Mom had been a language major in college, and loved to pepper her speech with foreign words and expressions. I suppose she also thought that if she bribed and cajoled me, I would give in and do her bidding, which most of the time, as her younger, compliant daughter, I did.

“Gigi, I’ll get ‘em for you,” my son said, snatching the bill with a grin, upon which I told him to hand it over and mind his own business.

“What a good boy you are!” my mother cried. “But you need to stay with Gigi while your Mutter shops.”

“Mom, you forgot Gigi’s Fritos!” my son cried. Within seconds of my setting the plastic sac on the seat beside him, he had pulled out milk, seltzer, wine, everything but the evil snack.

“Yeah, well, they were all out,” I said.

“You’re pulling my leg,” my mother said, turning around to inspect the contents of the bag herself.

“I’m not. I looked up and down every aisle, and there were all out. Nada.” I started up the car and revved the motor as if I were preparing to compete at the Daytona Speedway.

“That’s a big fat lie,” my mother said.

“Tant pis!”

We called a Christmas truce to the Fritos battle, and the family segued through the remainder of Christmas Eve without incident. There was the cabbage-and-tofu dinner, pronounced a culinary success by all, including my mother-in-law, who had once made snide remarks about my cooking, something she had long forgotten. There was the ritual opening of one present each, as well as halting piano renditions of Silent Night and Joy to the World (played by your humble blogger), to which we sang lustily, if not tunefully.

Christmas day was the usual exhausting extravaganza with ripped paper and torn bows everywhere and my mother-in-law exclaiming, like a refrain in nursery ditty, “Santa was SO good to us this year,” and my mother doting over the gifts that would go straight back into their boxes, not to be opened up again. The Christmas Day dinner was as festive as its Christmas Eve predecessor. There were no broken wineglasses or chipped dishes, and nothing was spilled on my mother-in-law’s red tablecloth with its trumpet-wielding white angels….

Of course, there was the problem of my mother’s tendency to dominate any gathering with her long-winded ancestor narratives. (Sir Andrew Wyse, who had been best buds with Henry II, made his customary cameo appearance.) All of us, including my mother-in-law, had heard these stories before but we were too polite to say so. It was, after all, Christmas, and excess was the order of the occasion—in eating, drinking, and talking.

As the day crept on little reindeer hooves into evening, my mother showed no signs of letting up with her 12 centuries of ancestor tales. Finally, after my husband had repeatedly mouthed across the room, “You’ve got to get her to shut up,” I convinced her that we all had had too much Christmas and it was time to drive back to the motel.

Our son was asleep when I returned, and my husband was busy measuring out his mother’s nighttime regimen of pills, all prepackaged and labeled by the nursing home, to which we would return her the next day. I was looking forward to a leisurely bath, and he was looking forward to some quiet beside the wood stove. But as he took her by the arm and gently guided her up the stairs, it was evident she had other plans.

“Oh, no you don’t, Mister,” she said, in a loud and unnaturally vigorous voice,
“You’re my husband, and I’m not going to bed without you.”

“Mom, we’ve all had a long day, and it’s time for everyone to turn in.”

“Nosireee. I’m not going another step without you.”

Sundowning, affecting some forty percent of dementia sufferers, is that dreaded condition where the coming of late afternoon and darkness brings all manner of anxiety, agitation, and confusion. My mother-in-law suffered from Sundowning episodes in the nursing home—we had not witnessed them, but there had been several phone calls from the night nurses reporting that she had tried to escape, or had taken a swipe at another resident. Often, just hearing her son’s voice persuaded her to cease and desist, to go gently into that good night of bed.

Her son did becalm her that long-ago Christmas night, but it took close to an hour with my mother-in-law yelling that she wasn’t going upstairs and my husband reassuring her that it had been a long day and that we had had a good Christmas and that Santa had indeed been good to us. At one point, my son padded out in the hall to ask what was wrong and we reassured him that everything was fine and he should go back to bed.

The worst, of course, did come: six months later, my mother became a Christmas tree ornament (the funeral home sent my sister and me a gold-plated star, complete with my mother’s name and birth and death dates). Five years after my mother’s passing, my mother-in-law was laid to rest in the Star-of-the-Sea Cemetery in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Is it possible that I am nostalgic for this blue Christmas of Fritos battles and Sundowning? I am, which proves that the human condition is stranger than anything Santa and his reindeer could scare up.

Royal Blue Beloved

You grow up with the fiction that you will never become your mother. Then one day, perhaps in a photograph taken in an unscripted moment at a family gathering, leaning close to a young niece as you help her unwrap a new Barbie doll, you spy it: her nose that she was so proud of, that she often made jokes about (“You’ve got a Roman nose—it’s roamin’ all over your face”) has become your nose. For years, you have insisted that yours was less beaky, more ski-jump shaped. Peering closer, holding your breath because the resemblance unnerves you, you notice other mirrorings: there is that same over-radiant grin that clamps down tight over darkened, crooked teeth, that same manic intensity that threatens to erupt from your skull.

Or maybe the moment of genetic truth creeps up more stealthily: a pickpocket in the Christmas season. You are in your local public library, killing time before you pick up your child from school and take him to the dentist, and the magazine you reach for is not the “New York Review of Books” with its analysis of the banking crisis of ’08 but the latest issue of “People”—the Royal Report--featuring the young woman with the shining, orthodontic-perfect teeth, the bed curtains of long, brown hair that descend to a royal blue dress. You grope the pages of the Royal Report. You flip open to more of that wrap dress with the rusching beneath the breasts (it’s by Issa), to that sapphire ring wreathed with diamonds climbing up that tapered fourth finger like an exquisite tropical beetle crawling up the slender branch of a bamboo tree.

You can’t stop yourself; you are a bulimic with a quart of mint chocolate-chip ice cream, you suck up every last detail: how Will popped the question in a mountaintop cabin in Kenya, how the wedding will be held in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day in April (“Why April?” you wonder, idly quoting T.S. Eliot, ‘April is the cruelest month’), how Kate wishes she had known Diana, who wore that same sapphire ring thirty years ago when she was a fat-cheeked, nineteen-year-old former nanny.

You remember going through your mother’s things after her death, how you found half a bookcase full of royal-related tomes. There were biographies of Queen Elizabeth (I and II), of Victoria and Albert, Nicholas and Alexandra, Charles and Diana, oversized illustrated histories of the Royal House of Windsor, collectors' editions of “Life” and “People” magazines featuring the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the funeral and burial of Diana.

The pile of royal titles in your mother’s estate did not surprise you, since you yourself gave her many of these books, for birthday and Christmas gifts. But as you packed up the library in a crate for the local hospice shop, you considered that it was a little like giving chocolate to a diabetic…escaping into the castles of European royalty did not help her become the architect of her own life, the late-life artist she dreamed of becoming...if only she had time.

But how are you, who grew up mooning over Princess Anne in “Life” magazine, Princess Anne in velvet-collared hacking jacket and matching velvet cap bent over a chestnut thoroughbred, Princess Anne in yards of lace, wrapped around her strong-jawed Captain Mark Phillips, how are you different?

You can recall, the way others remember where they were when the Twin Towers fell, what you were doing on July 29, 1981 (deconstructing, with your first husband and another couple in a suburban New Jersey family room, that poignant moment when Diana mixed up Charles’ multiple middle names as she said her vows); whom you were with when you learned that the marriage had been doomed from the moment it began, with Charles in love with Camilla and teenaged Diana nothing but a prized filly to be groomed and whipped by the Windsors (you were between husbands then, and the demise of that fairy tale made you fear no romantic tie was safe); what you were doing on the hot end-of-August day when you learned Diana had met her end speeding through a Paris Tunnel with her lover, Dodi Fayed (having breakfast with your dad, his longtime companion, your second husband and three-year-old son); how you got up at dawn to watch the funeral in Westminster Abbey, how your husband snickered “Celebrity Death!” as you sat in your egg-stained terrycloth robe, weeping as Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind.”

You learn that Kate Middleton will become the first queen in the thousand-year reign of the British monarchy to have earned a college degree (with honors from St. Andrew’s University in Edinburgh, where she met her prince and studied art history), and you consider how your mother, so proud of her own Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College, would love that detail, how she would say that women really have come a long way, that two hundred years ago our great-great-great grandmothers could not go to college or vote or own property.

You discover that a record television audience is expected to watch Kate & Will’s wedding in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day on April 29, 2011, which the United Kingdom has already declared a national holiday. (You google Saint Catherine, and learn that she was born in Siena in 1347, the youngest of 25 children, that half her brothers and sisters died of the Black Death, that Catherine had a vision at aged six of Jesus Christ, that she refused marriage, fasting until she was granted her wish to become a nun--“Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee,” she is meant to have said--that she devoted herself to healing the sick and uniting the warring states of Italy, that her letters are considered some of the greatest works of Tuscan literature).

You pray for Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, that her life with Diana’s first-born son, who was only 15 when he walked behind his mother’s casket, will be joyful, a companionate marriage of equals, that it won’t end in betrayal and divorce, that Kate will teach other women, women like you who are secretly dazzled by her, to claim our extraordinary powers.
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