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.

Blue Light

I remember her on her haunches in the upstairs hall banging her butt one hundred times on the cherry-planked floor, getting red in the face and not stopping her counting, even for a second, when my sister or I would interrupt to ask her a question. She also performed an exercise where, dressed in nothing but her bra and panties, she would clench her right fist and beat it against her right thigh; then she would take her left fist and beat it against her left thigh. Each fleshy thigh received fifty lashes. I never asked where she had learned these spot-reducing techniques—no doubt she picked them up at the Harry Conover Agency, where she worked as a model in the year before she married my dad.

“Have you checked your weight today?” a flat, computer-generated voice asked, interrupting the movie-in-my-head of my mother, circa 1965. I was passing directly in front of the General Nutrition Center storefront with its pyramids of vitamins at the Mountain View Mall. Most of the time I ignored the talking scale, but on that rainy July afternoon, chafing beneath my tightening waistband, I feared that I had put on a few pounds. (I had thrown out my bathroom scale years ago after having been advised to do so by FAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.) I duly removed my cotton jacket, sneakers and shoes: such outerwear could add two to three pounds, and I wanted to keep the number as low as possible.

I mounted the scale, fed two quarters into the slot, punched in some data regarding my age, build, and height, held my breath, and stood very still as the screen instructed. In thirty seconds, a square slip of paper popped out, imprinted with various numbers and letters, including the date, my weight, and whether I was within my ideal weight range or not. (For another twenty-five cents, I could receive a diet/fat analysis as well as a biorhythm outlook, but having signed up for these less-than-useless extras some time ago, I passed.)

Reader, I don’t expect you to regard this as a tragedy, but I had gained seven pounds! Seven pounds since I last weighed myself two summers ago on this very scale. Seven pounds in two years is three and a half pounds per year, which is about what a middle-aged woman can expect to gain after she reaches 50. The metabolism of the middle-aged is as notoriously sluggish as a gunk-filled bathtub drain: if you don’t reduce your daily calorie intake by 300-500 calories or begin a vigorous exercise plan, you’re going to start looking like a Shaker barn before Obama comes up for re-election.

What was this fat-lady-to-be to do? I had long given up my morning-glory muffin habit, and I was already riding my bike several miles a day. I wasn’t about to start banging my butt on the floor.

Surfing the Internet the next day, I pulled up a web page giving information about a Blue DietLight Refrigerator Appliance Bulb. For the low price of $9.95 plus $6.95 for shipping and handling (Ohio residents must add sales tax), you can receive this magic blue bulb, screw it into your refrigerator, and “watch the munchies disappear.” (For $19.95, you can also receive the weight loss hypnosis compact disc.)

Apparently, the color blue works as a natural appetite suppressant, which is why restaurants used to offer low-cost Blue Plate specials. The most ancient hunter-gatherer part of the brain associates blue with moldy, spoiled food, and naturally recoils. With the exception of blueberries, mussels, and eggplants, there are actually very few naturally occurring blue foods, which may account for this ancient pairing of blue and inedibility. The blue-plate diner morphs into the proverbial picky-eater, and the crazed refrigerator-raider whose Blue DietLight bulb glows over that cheesecake will think twice about forking into it.

Five thousand years of color therapy culled from ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Tibetan, and Native American cultures has shown that the color blue is balm to the soul, explained the website. And lest you still think the Blue DietLight and Hypnosis CD is a scam, read on: the Harvard Business School-- and here the blue type was magnified into screaming 20-point font--reports that blue light promotes positive decision making, and strengthens resolve.

I didn't order the Blue DietLight: I know from exhaustive experience that diets and diet-related products don't work. When I was a teenager working at my first paid job of ski instructor, I was called “Rotunda,” by some of my jokey male co-workers. I didn’t find this funny, nor was I amused when they said: “You don’t have hips, you’ve got ships.” I cried all the way to the candy machines in the base lodge, where I becalmed myself with an Almond Joy, and vowed to start Atkins the next day.

On the Atkins diet, you can eat unlimited amounts of meat and bacon and cottage cheese, but you must stay away from bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, and, of course, candy. I lasted about a week, and moved on to the Scarsdale Diet even though I’ve never been crazy about grapefruits. But only a Trappist monk could stick to the 700-calorie-a-day regime. When Jean Harris gunned down the diet’s creator, Hy Tarnower, because he was two-timing her with his young nurse, I could never take the Scarsdale diet seriously again.

Several years later, I signed up for Weight Watchers, but I always felt exposed at the group weigh-ins, and it was way too much work to keep track of my food points, though I did develop a fondness for Weight Watcher’s two-point English Toffee Crunch bars. I briefly joined Overeaters Anonymous, which works on the same 12-step principles as Alcoholics Anonymous, but everyone in the group was about 100 pounds overweight and I felt a teeny bit self-conscious.

After my son was born, I managed to hover about ten or twenty pounds above my ideal weight, but the prospect of ballooning back into “Rotunda” lodged like a burnt-out bulb in the most ancient part of my brain.

My mother also tried various diets, but they were no match for her ever-enlarging shape. By the time she was sixty-five, she was forty to fifty pounds overweight (she was mortified about the actual number and would never reveal it to me). She had also developed adult onset Diabetes, which is a truly nasty disease. If untreated, it can lead to foot amputations, blindness and heart disease. She started taking Glucovance, but continued to sneak junk foods. Under her bed and in the glove compartment of her car, she hid bags of Fritos, potato chips, and cans of mixed nuts.

During the last three weeks of her life, in one of life’s stranger-than-fiction ironies, my mother became as slender as the girl she had been decades ago. She was admitted to the local hospital for a mysterious infection, which the doctor said was related to her Diabetes and which she had suffered from intermittently for the past several months. My mother had always hated hospitals, and had been fortunate never to spend much time in them. Other than the two weeks she passed in the maternity ward after giving birth to my sister and me, my mother had never been admitted to a hospital, not even to an emergency room.

In any event, being confined to a hospital meant being forced to eat hospital food, which she deplored. The overcooked packet-of-cards-sized pork chop went untouched, as did the puddles of mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She waved away the tiny servings of butterscotch and rice puddings, and sometimes I ended up eating them when I visited. This would prompt me to narrate my favorite Woody Allen joke about the two elderly ladies in the resort in the Catskills: “‘Boy, the food in this place is really terrible,’ one says. ‘Yeah, I know,’ the other says, ‘and such small portions.’”

My mother laughed, praised me for being such a card, then begged me to go out to the supermarket and bring her back a bag of Fritos. I refused, and pointed out that being deprived of 24/7 access to junk food would prove a blessing in disguise. She would get down to the weight she had always dreamed of, go off the Glucovance, and live to see 100.

It was not to be. She suffered a massive heart attack twenty-six hours later. She spent the next five days in intensive care and the following week she was shifted into the hospice ward. I gave her a back rub on the last day of her life, and I was shocked at how the ridges of her spinal column stood out against her pale, age-freckled flesh. She probably weighed less than she did when she was a tomboy of twelve, before the onset of the fleshy thighs and buttocks that would prove such a lifelong torment.

“We’re right here,” my sister and I whispered to her over and over in those last moments when we stood on either side of her bed, gripping her limp fingers and telling her that we loved her. The hospice worker had explained that even though she appeared to be unconscious, she could still hear our voices, still sense our presence. Over and over until it became a mantra that slowed the beating of our own hearts, we said, “Everything’s going to be O.K.”

If only she had been able to say this to herself, fifty times for the right ear, fifty times for the left ear, how different her life might have been: no Fritos, no Diabetes, nothing to dim her resolute blue light.

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