Ten years ago my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. For Christmas that year, my dad bought my mom a beautiful diamond anniversary ring. It was an eye-popper and dad was all but bursting with pride to surprise her with it on Christmas day.
She never saw it.
Only three weeks before Christmas, a biopsy revealed a malignancy. My active, healthy mother had no prior serious illness, but stomach pains on Thanksgiving Day were severe enough to take her to the hospital where doctors discovered an abnormality in her stomach and ordered the biopsy.
This news hit our family hard, but Mom was a fighter and she determined to put up a good one. The recommendation was surgery followed by chemotherapy. Surgery was scheduled exactly a week before Christmas.
The boys and I already had our plane tickets to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad in Orlando. We were to leave on Friday, December 22. Monday, the day of surgery arrived and with it the revelation that there was little doctors could do except offer a rigorous course of chemotherapy. We were completely blind-sided by this news but supportive, positive and full of hope.
We changed our plane tickets and arrived in Florida on Wednesday. We held onto hope and the belief that Mom would be strong enough to come home for Christmas. After all, there were gifts to unwrap and a new brilliantly lit tree she had helped decorate; her beloved boxer Sadie was patiently waiting for her to return; and my Mom’s sister, Roberta, was scheduled to arrive from California the day after Christmas. No thought existed that she would never see these things again.
We spent nearly all waking hours at the hospital. When it became clear that she was too weak to leave the hospital, we rallied to be there around the clock from Christmas Eve morning through all of Christmas day, taking turns throughout the night. All the gifts would be brought to the hospital Christmas morning and opened there, including the ring.
The hospital called at one o’clock Christmas morning for my brother and I to come and join our father in saying goodbye to our mother.
This was a Christmas full of hills and valleys. Time existed in minute increments of moving from one moment to the next, one thought to the next, but as a family together, we endured. Life, as we knew it, had changed forever, adding a memory to Christmas that for ten years now has invited remembrance, reflection and in some ways, renewal.
Ten years ago, on Christmas day, my children woke up to one of the saddest days of their lives. Twice, I’ve had to deliver hard news to them—when their father left and when their grandmother died. No parent ever wants to break their childrens’ hearts, but certain things we just can’t control. Helping them learn to accommodate the things in their lives that we can’t fix just gives them a few more feathers to steady their wings when they prepare to take flight.
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