I couldn't write this in the midst of it all, the first Christmas without a living parent. The First Christmas as the matriarch in fact, not de facto. It's not really about Christmas, either. It's about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and the amazing amount of power we truly have to choose those stories and thus change how we look at our lives.
Dad died in September of 2008, 3 weeks after we celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. Mom's dementia was far enough advanced that we chose dinner in a local restaurant, not a huge party. She didn't remember being married, and daddy was The Man who lived with her and was very nice to her. Her story, pre-dementia, was one of endless fighting, misunderstanding, betrayal, disappointment. Dad's happiest years were the last 5, the ones after her litany of resentments had slipped away and she depended on him, liked him, trusted him.
After the Memorial Service we hit the reality wall. Mom was far more advanced than we had known. Daddy did a great job of getting her out of the room and into their little attached apartment before it got clear that she wasn't really there, and mom's basic social skills didn't leave her until she was classified late stage advanced vascular dementia. In other words, until she could no longer speak anything but sentence fragments or gibberish.
The next 2 1/2 years were challenging. We managed to keep mom home, a heart incident qualified her for long-term Hospice Care so we had medical and social support, and my sister Carol and I could split the mom-care duties and continue to earn some money as Liturgical Musicians. Carol also taught voice and piano. We had one morning a week free, the 4 hours mom spend at a local church in a program called My New Best Friend. Everyone was new to mom by then, including her daughters.
Eventually we lucked out, found a couple running a 4-resident care facility out of their home, and mom spent her final 19 months there. We knew she was well cared for, tried to live with the sorrow of not being recognized, then not even being acknowledged. By her last Christmas with us we were drop-in visitors, not engaging with her because she was in a strange musical world of chanting and drumming.
We got a phone call about her loss of appetite, something dangerous when you weigh 103 pounds at 5'6". She deteriorated quickly, was bedridden within a couple of weeks.
An 8 day vigil, sitting by her bed in pairs, or sometimes all 4 local kids and our delightful sister-in-law. I had one day alone with her, entirely against my will. I was furious about having to be alone, having no distraction from the reality that my mom was dying. Then I remembered a conversation with dad about 2 months before he died. That was a complex relationship and I spent many years angry with him, hurt, confused.
Our last 5 months together were very healing. Instead of being a little girl needing daddy's love and approval, I had become a woman able to look at him as a separate, dynamic human being. On this particular evening he talked about his feeling of failure as a preacher, how much he regretted putting himself and all of us through that life when it was not really his choice or calling, it was a family legacy he felt compelled to honor. I said "If I had magic I'd give you a life as a professor. You're a brilliant teacher, and the smartest man I've ever known. You'd have been a rockstar on campus." He laughed, then nodded his head, able to see that he probably would have been beloved, and happy. What freed me that night was getting it that I was a bit player in his life, not the biggest disappointment. His anger was with himself, leaking out on those closest to him. I started telling myself a different story about him and me.
On my alone day with mom I told her a different story about her, as a mother and a woman. With Jo Stafford singing in the background I told her everything she'd done that made my life richer, deeper, more worthwhile.
We found out during our last year with her still talking how much she saw herself as a failure - not at all our picture of her. She was stupid. She didn't know what to do. Those were chants, litanies repeated again and again. Stupid, stupid, stupid. One evening there was an hour of amazing clarity where she told me the story of her childhood at 216 Nevada - that house was always named. "It was a beautiful house, we loved it so much, Erik never left his bedroom he hated dad, we used to laugh a lot, Barbara was always angry she married Jack just to get away, we had amazing musicales with mother's students I think she hated being a wife and mother her students adored her but she was always impatient and angry at home, I never knew what to do to make them happy, it was such a wonderful home we were so happy there, I never knew how to make things right. Stupid" An hour of opposites, a clear view of the life they presented to the world and the reality she blamed herself for not being able to fix. I wanted to tell her that she'd known what to do with me, with us, even when things were pretty nuts in the family.
We'd found her scrapbooks, 47 volumes of her life. For 3 years, from the time when she knew her memory was failing, she cleared out The Monster and a 4-drawer file cabinet and put life in order. There's a JFK assassination book, a 9/11 book, a book about our years with Another Mother For Peace and Clergy and Laymen Concerned. There are two WAVE books, one for each year she served. The first opened with the front section of the paper that declared America was joining the war. The second ended with the Armistice Day headlines. In between were all her papers, reviews, letters to and from home, to fellow WAVES stationed elsewhere, pictures of war weddings, her discharge papers, one wrenching letter to her best friend regretting taking her dad's advice about enlisting. He had connections in Washington, knew the GI Bill was coming and wanted help sending his 5th child to college.
Then there were the in-depth family albums, every birthday, every trip, every summer at the cabin, every Christmas, every family reunion, every visit with friends from college and the seminary, every return to former parishes, every parsonage, every church. It changed my childhood memories. Yes, there was stress, there were tensions, there were yelling fights and slamming cupboard doors and simmering resentments. There was a young me, becoming the second mother at about age 4, with 2 younger siblings and a third on the way. There was grief about no childhood, too much responsibility, too many years spent trying to protect my mom and keep her happy so we wouldn't be abandoned. There were also gold crowns for the Birthday child, a donut with a candle in the morning, and a huge dinner with a magnificent cake in the evening. Gold crowns, pretty dresses, white shirts, dress pants and small ties for the boys. The cake had a second circle of candles that rested on the plate, complete with folk angels, paper bouquets, tiny wooden harps. There was holding hands and singing in Norwegian as we circled the Christmas tree, there were tableaux as daddy read the Gospel - Mary and Joseph and a donkey (usually me under an Army blanket) being turned away from the Inn, Mary and Joseph and sometimes a doll sometimes a real baby in the homemade manger, my 3 brothers as shepherds and then Wise Men, my 3 sisters draped in white sheets being The Heavenly Host, singing angel carols. I was the director, costumier, occasional angel.
There were pictures of us in every national park, in DC, on the Staten Island Ferry, in the working sections of the Smithsonian, thanks to mom's cousin. There were pictures of us in the scariest tree house you can imagine, gleeful about being so high in the sky. Every first day of school, each year's line-up Christmas picture and the Christmas letters they graced. Easter finery, me at 14 looking like a young matron in hand-me-downs from mom's sisters, complete with matching pillbox hat. Jackie Kennedy had a long reach, those clothes came to me 4 years out of date, but quite stunning for a preacher's kid accustomed to homemade clothing.
I remembered the bride doll, Christmas of 1957, in a red metal steamer trunk with a rack of beautifully handmade clothes. When did she sleep? The twins were born in March of 1958, there were already 5 children, and I had handstitched dresses for my doll.
These are the things I want to remember, these are the stories I want to tell. Dwelling on the struggles sucks the life out of me, makes me less effective, less engaged, less willing to create and nurture communities. It dries me out, leaves me disconnected from music, from love, from the minutes of each day that need to be noticed and lived fully. I'm not young, my bones get cold and my knees ache and predict rain. I want my last years, however many there are of them, to be lived telling stories of the woman who handstitched doll clothes, got up at 5 AM to make birthday donuts, baked 11 loaves of bread at a time, and several dozen hamburger buns every Saturday night, after bathing 7 kids, curling 4 heads in socks, badgering dad to polish shoes, ironing dresses and small white shirts so we'd be in the front pew Sunday morning looking our best, while she directed the choir and played the organ.
I want to tell stories of me being a loving mom despite my failures, of me being a loving sister despite my faults, a loving daughter - finally freed of sadness and grief by a too-long-delayed realization that I'm a woman now, and fully capable of living a good life because I had parents who did their best to teach me how to do that.
The first Christmas was sometimes hard and sad and lonely. It was also finding out that the next generation will not allow us to quit baking those damn cookies, making the Norwegian meatballs, Sutsuppe, (sweet soup), ordering the lefse, baking the sweet bread, singing the old songs, reading the Gospel story ranged around the tree. It was a good Christmas. We remembered the lovely parts, and were grateful to have each other.