All the Holidays
Full circle, a year of missed holidays
“A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream.” ― David Steindl-Rast
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A String of Holidays
Looking at the dates of the upcoming Sundays a few days ago, this one was still blank but with several possibilities, several things I’ve removed from recent posts, knowing the weight of words, the length of words, the preference these days for the fortune cookie slip, the wisp of story.
I write surgically removed, but when I reread the words, I think, instead, of how random and clunky the final chopping is, how heartbreaking and yet detached. In the wee hours before I schedule a post and go to bed, I do final rounds of removing things, too tired to resist, too tired to be judicious or sentimental, tearing out sections that are overly personal, burdened by detail or by what is missing.
It is an unceremonious process. Highlight and delete. My draft, itself, is full of sections that are struck through and marked CUT so that I know to keep them in my draft but delete them from the post even before the editing begins.
Drafts are yellow-brick roads with myriad dark and winding and branching paths as I follow stray thoughts, the glint of memory, the light on the water, the nuthatch in the tree. Cutting is a necessity.
But the midnight hours aren’t always the best time for surgery, for objectivity, or for precision cutting. I might make different decisions in daylight.
Looking at the dates, I keep reminding myself that Thanksgiving is coming. I have to factor that in. I have to factor that into my writing and into the real world, too. We have no plans. I don’t know if my oldest is coming home. Distances have multiplied after death. I don’t know what we will eat. I don’t want to cook. I can’t fit in my clothes. (It is a nonsensical next line, and yet it is the chain of thought.)
Macaroni and cheese would be my pick. We have been nontraditional more years than not, so macaroni and cheese doesn’t seem all that odd. Lasagna would really be my pick. But I’m not sure I care. I’m not sure I want to cook. Eggplant parmesan would really be my pick, but the eggplant parmesan days are over. Pizza would always be my pick.
I’ll write the crazing this week, I tell myself, but Thanksgiving is coming, winter on its heels. The rains started this week, and it feels early. We are already cold in the house. He asked me last night about the space heater, and I am reminded again how little they listen, how little they paid attention or pay attention. I am relieved that the space heater will not be on. The risk of it was a constant source of worry.
But we are cold.
I spend time looking at weighted blankets online, but then I imagine sitting with three or four bags of sugar or rocks on top of me, and I get confused. (My initial thought was to buy a small blanket and turn it into a pillow, something to hold on my lap, hold close, hold me in place in the living room, hold as a buffer against the world. As I got colder, I moved on to just considering a blanket.)
I really think I should just repost last year’s piece on Thanksgiving, and there was another gingko piece in the same time frame, a found leaf story, maybe the week before, a leaf of hope, a symbol, a sign, a moment in a parking lot. And then there was Thanksgiving week. That was a Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.
That Wednesday was supposed to be a homecoming and wasn’t. I was on the phone with her that morning talking about the pickup, and then everything went wrong. That Wednesday, I went and picked up belongings instead. That Wednesday, a turtle in an enclosure in the hallway charged at the glass as I stopped to look at it. That Wednesday, I lost her for hours.
Literally.
By afternoon, no one could sort out where they had taken her. The rehab facility had put her in an ambulance that morning, but there was no trail. Protocol said she should have been one place, but the ER department had no record. I called a list of hospitals, a few I had never even heard of, trying to track down the morning admission.
But wait. Let’s back up.
I didn’t know I was going quite to that moment.
I was thinking about holidays, holidays in general.
I looked for my notes because I remember writing this. I hear the echoes in my head, but I can’t find them. I feel sure I’ve documented this in my futile attempts to gather in every stray thought, every detail. I am stringing and winding these thoughts and fragments onto a spool, making the thread. I haven’t made a dent. There are piles of broken and disconnected bits, threads and slivers of glass.
Spinning the thread takes time. Everything is more and more muddled. Finding the needles in the haystack has left my fingers with hundreds of pinpricks.
The holes in the fabric of my scattered notes over the last few years have left me with lace that has been further destabilized by moths. The holes are larger in most places than the fabric. I am more and more alarmed at the instability of the weave. I wander at the edges of the holes, trying to build upon the fray, trying to jump the gaps, build bridges, hoping that in the tracing and retracing, in the fingering of lace, details will surface that can be used to slow stitch, to layer, to repair, and to strengthen.
The deeper I wander into the woods, the more I doubt the shimmering trail, question the crumbs.
I trace the texture of the lace, a raised imprint on a map, pausing at chasms where the stitches trail off, blurring into emptiness.
I am always working on a shawl or a cloak of some form. I am always running, back to the viewer, across a Scottish moor, cloak on, and hood up. The mantle is one I continue to stitch, patch, and layer. When I am no longer able to support its weight on my shoulders, it will be a blanket.
Sometimes it is glass. The shifting metaphor is a puzzle and a comfort.
The tree outside the window is blowing, whipping, we would say where I’m from. Looking, I see clusters of leaves, hundreds on a single branch. There are hundreds of branches, thousands of individual leaves in that tree.
It is impossible to follow them, to count them, to draw them, to trace them.
It is the same with details, with roads, with events, with words sent or shared or withheld.
As June approached, I sat in the hospital chair, which was tucked in an odd little cutout in front of the window, a bit too far from the bed, an awkward distance but out of the way of the bathroom door, out of the way of the rack of machines and endless tangle of cords.
This chair has an orange or brown or rust or pink or flesh-toned seat. Or maybe it is blue. It squeaks when I sit on it, the friction of me moving against the surface.
In those final days, we joked about the upcoming birthdays, my mother’s, mine, and hers. We joked about July 4.
The Saturday before Memorial Day, she wanted a chai.
Years ago, I used to show up to the hospital with chicken salad sandwiches and Starbucks. We had two incomes, years and years ago, and a lifetime of possibility ahead. Chicken salad with green olives and cheese on toast and a coffee or a chai was a special blend of hospital magic. It faded. The quilted cup sleeves I made ended up tucked away in drawers.
This year, there had been no requests for a chai. This hospitalization, ins and outs (I/O) proving an impossible game, probably not.
Until that day. I offered. She said yes.
It was a Saturday, and I walked from the parking garage to the Starbucks in the medical building across from the hospital. The sign on the door said they were closed for Memorial Day. On Saturday, they were closed for the Monday holiday. On the one day she had asked for something, other than a five-pound bag of lifesavers, they were closed.
On Memorial Day, I went to a different Starbucks to pick up a chai. I went to the hospital, and we no doubt joked about it being yet another holiday.
“You have a real thing for major holidays,” I said, again and again last year. It became a running joke.
In the final year, she was in the hospital for Labor Day, and then Halloween, and then Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, a few days after New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. We laughed that the only holiday she was home for this year was Easter.
Missing holidays had been a joke for several years, but last year was the worst.
Thanksgiving was the holiday that was most frequently at risk. It was an issue in many years, either in the hospital or just home from the hospital or home but sick.
I’ve tried now to figure out when the first time was, the first November, and I still haven’t pieced everything together. I doubt I ever will. The details have all peeled away.
Last year was a yo-yo of hospitalizations broken by a few days here and there at home. Last year, everything was different and alarming, new problems being added to the ever-growing constellation of illness. Last year involved blood, lots and lots of blood.
Turning to stone has all kinds of repercussions. It is a sentence I am not ready to parse, but it is the epicenter of everything.
It isn’t that I am dreading Thanksgiving. I am grateful for so many things, but I don’t enjoy the spectacle and the cookie cutter expectations. It isn’t a favorite day.
This first Thanksgiving may sweep me away, but leading into it, I just haven’t stopped to really think about it.
I want to be home. I need to sit with the memories, the reality, the contours of now. I don’t want to have to worry about making other people comfortable. I don’t want a pep talk. I want to go for a walk at the lake. I want to play a game with my kids. I want to drink a glass of wine and not get sleepy.
I don’t care what we eat.
Last year I wrote to all of you about making the day (and any day like it) whatever day it needs to be for you and not getting caught up in what you think the day should be. Thanksgiving, especially, is the day that this has been true for me and for us.
I know so many people struggle with holidays like this one (for all kinds of reasons), and last year, braving our way through some challenging months, I wanted to reach out to those who struggle to say, “I see you.” To say, “Don’t let the story take over. Make it whatever day you need.”
I wish you a peaceful week. I wish you peaceful memories. I hope you are gentle with yourself and with whatever this week brings.
I hope there is room for gratitude.
Thanksgiving Week (or Related) Posts
Last year
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The weather folks definitely have a flair for the dramatic? A bomb cyclone followed by an atmospheric river. It is windy here this morning, but unfortunately no rain.
I envy ceramics for finding equilibrium, I will be clinking and pinging all my life.
We got a bit of your rain, not as much as you. Thanks for sharing your words Amy. Holidays can present a narrative not worth buying into. I used to run myself ragged and into a chronic blue period for the first two months of the year, seemingly every year. Your ideas about gratitude projects, art, journaling really gave me something new to focus on during that time instead, it’s become a time of year and project that I look forward to.