I'm Home

It's Christmas Eve. I'm here in the house where I grew up. Happy sigh. Even after forty-plus years of happy marriage, I still feel the need to come "home" for Christmas.

I don't mean that as a reflection on the home my husband and I have made together, or on him, or his side of our family, or the Christmas traditions we have with our own children. I just always have that "Folger's Coffee Commercial" kind of feeling about Home when it comes to Christmas.

Warning: I'm about to wax tear-jerking emotions all over the page.

Some of the best family times happened at Christmas. And some of the worse.
Christmas of 2002 was the beginning of a season of heartbreak and change. The first Christmas at home without my dad. Ever. He was in the hospital and our whole extended family came home. Waking up on Christmas morning without his "I know what you're getting for Christmas" to tease us one last time before opening presents was ... indescribable. As I watched my mother, who stayed upbeat and smiling, I could not help but think ... change is coming. (So strong, my mother.) But this, this is a first, and more will follow.

We trooped to the hospital where the nursing staff had reserved us a "party room" for the family to gather, complete with a Christmas tree for our gifts for Daddy. They wheeled him in to join us and he looked frail and pale and not at all well. It was the last time I saw him out of a hospital bed.

My sister, my daughter and I had worked for many months on a surprise project for my dad that involved most of the family. A project that we knew would be near and dear to his heart, and I had long anticipated the joy of giving that gift. I could "see" already how his eyes would light up and I knew what his appreciative grin would look like. I could hardly wait. But now, my excitement was dimminished by the brutal reality of Daddy's poor health.

Family was very important to Daddy. I grew up in the house where he was born in a family of Keepers, so there were many family things to cherish and a million past family stories to hear over and over, as well as the memories we made ourselves. Over the months of 2002, the three of us compiled and wrote an anecdotal history of our family. We started by making a list of all our favorite memories, then we contacted members of the family asking for a written contribution from each. We wrote, we edited, we printed; we put it all together into one large binder with a copy for Dad and each member of the family.

On Christmas morning 2002 in a hospital "party room" I got to see that special grin and hear those words of awe and appreciation for our labor of love. He opened other presents, but that one, that heavy tome, sat on his frail knees for a long time, as he turned pages and really realized what we had done. It was an amazing morning, one I can still picture in my head.

Because it was also our last Christmas with him.

On January 2, 2003, (One-Two-Three) Daddy died, without ever seeing home again. During that week between Christmas and New Year's, he read The Book. Each time I visited he had it open on his lap. He also made notes - impressions, typos, comments - and stuck them in the book with Post-It Notes. So like him! It still makes me smile.

Daddy ran out of Time and didn't get to read it all, but there was evidence that he read the most important parts. And enjoyed our effort as well as the memories he relived as he read. He told me once that he came home from the South Pacific after the war with the idea that he'd one day write a book. He never did write a novel, but he completed a long essay on his wartime experiences that was included in a book of area veterans' stories published by the county historical society. We included it in our family book. It was one of the reasons we undertook our writing project; we knew it was the kind of thing he'd appreciate most.

We've made many more sweet memories since that Christmas ten years ago. Mom is 90 years old this year, still in relatively good health, definitely in great spirits and still able to out-shop me. She is hosting the family Christmas Day gathering in our home of so many years. As I write, I am surrounded by the best memories.

And one of the worse.

So hard to believe it's been ten years since Daddy opened that gift. Ten years since we watched that familiar slow grin as he realized what he held in his lap. Ten years.

Someone gave a bit of life advice once that hit me so hard I immediately recognized it as profound truth. "I pray you will get to the point where you can remember more of what you had than what you lost."

I did and I can. I am thankful and I am blessed.

A little over a week ago in Newtown, Connecticut, 20 small children and six adults were brutally gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. My heart breaks for the families and for the lost soul of a twenty-year old boy who first killed his own mother before shooting out the glass door of the school to gain entrance. A senseless tragedy has become the precursor to what should have been a joyous Christmas filled with church and family and Santa and gap-toothed grins and presents under the tree. We may never understand, may never have the answer to Why.

Words are powerful but in the midst of blinding grief and pain, they are only a drop in the bucket, a grain of sand on a coastline of living and not strong enough to dent the thick wall of disbelief and horror at the loss of a child, a mother, a sister or cousin. Still, this is my prayer for the survivors:

One day, whether ten years or fifty years from this Christmas season, I pray that the memory of your lost ones will bring only smiles to your faces and joy to your hearts and that you, at last, will be able to remember what you had more than what you lost.