WRITING THE CHRISTMAS LETTER: 2019

“If you use the bad parts to get to the good parts you’ve done something good.” Elton John In the last week before Christmas I agonized over the production of a Christmas letter, the kind you add a personal sentence to, and send out to everybody who writes to you, and everybody you expect to get something from, even some people you don’t get anything from and haven’t for years. Back in November, when I carefully contemplated what to write in such a letter, I had decided not to write at all. That plan held up very well until a week before Christmas when people began writing to me. David and I used to co-produce a Christmas letter back in the days when it could be signed with both our names. I’d make a start some time in November, asking David what he thought we ought to write. He’d mention a few things. I would keep at it, adding and deleting, until I deemed it ready for proof-reading. David would correct the typing and add a thought or two. “That’s fine,” he’d say. “It’s ready to send.” Without David in the physical world, I believed the writing of my 2019 Christmas letter would be a solitary pursuit. But then, things got complicated. It seemed I was dealing with two versions of myself. There was the me who had decided to write a Christmas letter, and a reluctant woman sitting at my computer, refusing to press the keys. “How hard can it be to write a Christmas letter?” I said to the reluctant woman. “All you have to do is tell people what you did this year. Start at the beginning. Here. I’ll show you.” Pushing her aside, I wrote a paragraph. “David died on January 10,” I wrote. “His last few days were difficult because we often couldn’t understand what he wanted to say. But he was determined to be understood. He insisted that I immediately put money for 2019 into his tax free savings account.” He didn’t say, “You will have the money after I die if you put it in while I’m still alive.” But we both knew what he meant. He meant: “Go do it right now.” I showed my paragraph to the reluctant woman. She was outraged. “You can’t start a Christmas letter that way,” she scolded. So I pushed Delete and started over. “We were all saddened by David’s death at the beginning of the year,” I wrote. The reluctant woman stayed my hand. “That’s not entirely true,” she said. The truth is, you weren’t that sad because you thought it was time. You’re a lot sadder now than you were then. One of your favourite memories happened right after he died. Remember how you sat with him, marvelling at how his twisted tortured body had suddenly relaxed, how you lingered with him, holding his hand in absolute peace. That doesn’t sound very sad to me.” “Should I take it out then?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said. “Should I add the part about being peaceful at the end?” The reluctant woman was—well—reluctant. “Maybe you should skip David altogether and do what other people do. Try describing your grandchildren.” I pressed Delete and started over. “All five grandchildren make a project of delighting their Granny. Carys is a gymnast with a fondness for unicorns and Lewis can charm you while climbing on top of a table at lightning speed. Ben has learned to read in two languages, Evan builds something with Lego every morning before he goes to school, and Clara spent most of last week pretending to be a baby lion.” After that, I couldn’t think of another thing to say. So I wandered around the house, pouring cups of coffee, setting them down on various tables and losing track of them before I’d finished. “Come back here and finish this letter,” nagged the woman who had previously been sitting at my computer. “And don’t push the Delete key. This stuff about your grandchildren has potential. It just needs a little fluffing up. Take a break from that topic and tell them about your travels.” Feeling a little bit encouraged I wrote that I’d made four trips to Guelph, one to spirit River, one to Jasper and one to Vancouver. I spiced it up with some stories of cruising in French Polynesia. I was conscientious about naming people who had been there for me during my travels. Then I got up, searched the house, and used the microwave to warm the coffee from some of the abandoned cups. “Be happy,” I said to myself. When I sat down again I deliberately wrote about happy things. I wrote that I was happy to be living in my apartment, happy to be walking in my neighbourhood, to be playing bridge and going to exercise classes and writing for fun with new friends at the Joy of Writing Club. I wrote that I had joined two choirs. I mentioned that I still facilitated hope groups, having not quite completely retired from my work in hope studies. All of this was true, and my confidence grew—until it didn’t. In its place there came a tsunami of grief that sent me running to my bed where I howled in abject misery. “What now?” I cried out to the reluctant woman. “Do I have to quit, after all the work I’ve done?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t push the delete button.” Instead of continuing the letter, I went back to the computer and read an on-line article in Psychology Today. “You can’t outrun grief,” the author boldly declared. The reluctant woman considered this. “You are the living proof of that,” she said to me. “Perhaps you should grieve a while. Maybe you’ll be able to finish the letter tomorrow.” In our forty-five years of marriage David and I read hundreds of Christmas letters. Some were funny. One relative always drew her year in cartoons. Another used the language of a medieval castle. Some were informative—births, marriages and such. Others were boring. Enough said about that. But there was one letter that chilled us so thoroughly to the bone that we had to turn to each other for comfort. It was a devastating life summary, sent by Cousin Lila. It was cloaked in sadness and despair. Her husband and all his siblings had Alzheimer disease. She wrote details about each of them. She ended the litany by wishing all of us a Merry Christmas. “Lila is depressed,” I said to David. He said, “Everything in this letter is probably true, but I wouldn’t send it at Christmas time.” With this in mind, I turned back to the reluctant woman. “I’m not Cousin Lila,” I said, “and I’m not Susie Sunshine either. I want to write a Christmas letter. Who am I?” anyway?” “You’re a grumpy, weepy, unpredictable griever living a basically happy life,” she said. And so it was that I found myself back at the computer the following morning, cleaning up my writing and developing an opening paragraph something I hoped would tell a truth that could reasonably be followed by Merry Christmas wishes. “It will be a different sort of Christmas this year. No doubt each of us will miss David in our own way, though it has been some time since we had a Christmas that wasn’t influenced by the need to accommodate illness. I would say that grief in my case is less a gradual process of healing over time and more a situation where kamikaze attacks occur when you are doing well in the big picture. I’ve been concentrating on learning new things, having fun and paying it forward as a tribute to the small army of people who have been lighting up my life over the past few years.” The reluctant woman and I checked it over with a critical eye. It was a longish letter, a little too perky, a little too busy. But the time had come to add personal greetings and send it anyway. Out went the copies, one by one. After so much dilly-dallying, I had expected to be pleased. Instead, I found myself turning apologetically to the memory of David. “I’m sorry that letter seems so cheerful,” I said to him. “I failed to mention how broken-hearted I am. They should be told that every fiber of my being still wishes you were here. I wanted to tell them how utterly bereft I get when I think that all my future Christmas letters will be written without you. How could I have edited it all out?” But the memory of David was remarkably unperturbed. “We couldn’t have sent such a letter,” was his response. “It’s not in our nature. If we couldn’t have said something good, we wouldn’t have said anything at all. But I do think you could have mentioned the tax-free savings money we put in my name back in January. You’ve had that money in savings for a whole year now. That’s $5,500 plus interest you won’t have to pay taxes on. It is an accomplishment worth celebrating.” “Too late for this Christmas letter,” I said. “That story will have to be written elsewhere.”