2000-12-24 - 04:45:40
the near and the dear one, the old and the young

"You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do -- merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. I mean, here we all are, you know, and what are we to do about it?"

Every year on the last few evenings before Christmas, my dad reads A Christmas Carol to me and my brother. I don't remember how long we've done this, but it must be at least ten years. This year it almost didn't happen, what with one thing and another, but we managed to start the book tonight (well, I guess it was last night now). My dad got through the first two chapters, which is about an hour of reading aloud, and will do the remaining three... er... tonight, the 24th. For his kids, aged 14 and 18, who, in a third-generation atheist household, couldn't stand to have Christmas without their Dickens.

I love A Christmas Carol, probably in part because of the positive imprint from being exposed to it in such good circumstances, but just as my love for other authors that my father introduced me to, such as Conan Doyle and Paul Krassner, has endured, so has my appreciation of this book. I shall, one day, make a movie of it that's actually faithful to the original (it'll have all the good parts that the movie versions always leave out).

I figured this year for the acid test -- if we were going to get all grown-up and let the tradition slip, it would have been this time. We were determined to keep it. It's nice to know that some things will endure.

Boy, it was hard to type that. My grandmother's dying. Every time I see her has a real chance of being the last. So, tomorrow we will all gather up the gifts and turkey and have our last holiday dinner at Grandma's, which will entail the bunch of us (me, brother, parents, uncle, grandfather, and grandmother's caretaker) sitting at a table near the bed which Grandma doesn't really get out of anymore, having our dinner and conversing as best we can while somebody sits by her and helps her eat.

Someone has to HELP my grandmother EAT. How did this happen? Can I have the old Christmas dinners back where she sat next to me and corrected my table manners?

While I'm at it, how about the grandmother who showed me a letter from her relatives in Spain that we were then able to translate, together, from Spanish to English? I want the grandmother back who understood and empathized with me when I was struggling with manic depression and my own mother didn't believe I had it. I want the grandmother who could tell us about her Society of Friends meetings, and the lesbian couples who got married there, and the male friend who'd come to the meetings for a great many years and had recently become a female friend. I want the grandmother who recovered last year from the series of small strokes that everyone but me had expected her to die from; who went from weak incoherence in a nursing home back to bright-eyed clarity, if a little slower than before, in her own kitchen, because she was just that fucking strong.

I just want the grandmother from six months ago, who had a little trouble with her hearing, and a little more trouble with her sentences, but could still remember all the lyrics to "Joe Hill." When I left for school, she was still there. When I came back to visit just a couple months later, she was... gone. On our last visit but one, there were moments where I could not have sworn in a court of law that she knew who I was.

God damn it. Strong-willed, brilliant, beautiful people shouldn't be allowed to get old. As their bodies wind down, their minds should just get sharper and quicker, until one night they close their eyes, contented with what they've accomplished that day and that lifetime, and their hearts just run out of beats and shut down peacefully.

Of course, it's silly to say who should and shouldn't get old. Nobody should have to feel their own mind slipping out from under them. But especially not people that I, personally, have to deal with. Because if my dad has to watch it happen to his mother, then that means I'm going to have to watch it happen to my parents.

So why do I have to think about this now? I mean, it's been there in the back of my mind for the past couple months off and on, but why do I happen to be thinking ot it now?

Well, because I've been Christmas shopping.

What do you get for someone who has no use for jewelry, can't see well enough to read, can't hear well enough for CDs or tapes to be useful, and probably won't even remember you gave it to her fifteen minutes later?

I guess you just give her your presence. And sit by her bed and listen to her try for hours to put together just one full sentence, this woman who gave your father his own love of learning as well as his moral principles; who went to university (and did brilliantly, of course) when it was still unusual for women to do that; who raised two uncommonly smart children on her own, in the fifties; who may or may not now always know for sure who they are, or which is which.

Wholesome fulfilling holiday wishes to follow perhaps tomorrow. Please be good to each other.

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