Tick. Scrape. Clunk.

My Nephew's Gift

My Tree

A Favorite

My Tree Topper

Pretty, Pretty

My Aunt Edith - from the family archive. Yes! This is how my family celebrates Christmas, with guns.

Here are some images of my Christmas tree and of the uber-fancy drawing my eight year nephew made for me this year. December was bleak – but it was not all sadness. It’s just a big-ole mix of good and bad. While I was home, I met the children of a dear friend from college. Maya and Andy are wonderful parents and their children are beautiful and smart and funny. Their laughter and the sound of my mother crying are intertwined in my memories of this past Christmas.

Christmas is not terribly celebratory for my family. My father was killed in a farming accident eight years ago, two days after Christmas. He was buried on New Year’s Eve. Since then the holidays have been bittersweet, to say the least. Some years have been torturous, others simply maudlin, and some quite joyous. It’s really hard to predict where the emotional pendulum is going to swing any given Christmas. This year, Christmas was very bleak and while I was home visiting my family, it turned a little darker.

Saturday, on the anniversary of my father’s death, my mother was told that her brother, who is dying from skin cancer, had slipped into a near-coma. On top of that, my nephew and his wife lost their two-month old baby that day. As I stood in the kitchen watching my mother shaking, trying to open her blood pressure medicine, trying to cope with this extraordinary amount of bad news, I was reminded of my father’s death and the ensuing sadness and stillness that filled our home for weeks afterward. I felt powerless to help her, and overwhelmingly numb.

Death brings extreme quiet to your home. Everything gets slower and louder. Clocks tick louder. Even the digital ones. And then there’s the scraping sound of chairs on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, as another neighbor pulls up a chair, asking how you’re doing as she places a casserole of potatoes on an already-full table. That is what death sounds like: Tick. Scrape. Clunk.

We drove into the Appalachian mountains that day to see my uncle. He was an extraordinary man. At 17, he hitchhiked to college. He dropped telephone lines during World War II, traveling ahead of the troops, right into the line of fire. He was a teacher and a dean of Education for two Universities. He was a husband and a father and one of the most distinguished and most friendly people that I’ve ever know. He had the most elegant voice I’ve ever heard. Seeing him that day, his nose a baseball-size black mound of rotting flesh, was as horrible as finding my father buried face-down, suffocated in a grain silo eight years prior. Death was as palpable in his home as it was in that grain silo. And I found myself utterly emotionless.

While my mother held her brother’s hand and spoke to him, I sat on his sofa, petting his dog. I couldn’t stop looking at him, lying still in a hospital bed they set up in his den. Rather, I couldn’t stop looking at his nose. My mom told me that it had once been a solid mass, but that mass had started to peel away, and large chunks of cancer-ridden black skin were peeling away. They looked like those snakes that ooze out of the fireworks you buy at the convenient store. The really cheap ones that spark and fizzle while mounds of dried-up black gunpowder ooze out. It was simply horrific. He gurgled (radiation treatments destroyed his saliva glands) and he choked on the mists of water his caregivers sprayed in his mouth. He has amazing women who come in every day and take care of him. They were there when his wife was dying from cancer, helping him take care of her, and now they are with him as he dies, painfully and alone.

The University of Kentucky was playing University of Louisville that day. That college rivalry is as big as a rivalry can get. Families divide over that game. A U of L fan, I really wanted them to win. But my uncle was a big U.K. fan (he’d worked there) – and, for his sake, I wanted him to wake up and hear that U.K. had won. As I was petting Clyde the dog, I imagined him being happy for even a few minutes, upon hearing the news of U.K.’s dramatic victory. But they lost, my uncle didn’t wake up, and the dog went into the garage and went to sleep.

My uncle is still alive. But he has not regained consciousness. He’s still there, barely breathing, still gasping and occasionally shaking. The Hospice workers said that now that the cancer has spread to his throat, they expect the cancer to erode a major vein or artery. He will bleed to death when that happens, suffocating on his own blood. They told my mother they had dark towels to mop up the excess. That’s the reality these very kind women have to face. But they still tend to him, talk to him, tell him jokes and watch after Clyde.

So here I am, almost a week after all this happened. Trying to understand what I felt and what I am feeling. I feel strangely lucky to be alive and healthy. My mood, while contemplative, is not dour. Today at work, I realized that I felt okay. It was the first time I’ve felt okay since I saw a grave blanket last month, the word dad spelled out in fake poinsettias. I joked and kidded around and not in that fake way you can kid around when you feel like shit. I actually really felt good. But feeling okay, or even quite good, while so much death and sadness looms around my family makes me feel like some-sort of traitor. Like Miss Scarlet at the ball, all clad in black, but tapping her toe, nonetheless.

Many folks who know me can attest that my laugh could rattle windows. But I have no such emotional release for sadness. While my laughter is boisterous, my sadness is its absolute counterpoint. It’s a dark, sad and very quiet place. Sometimes I wish I could just wail out, cry, scream, holler…..but it takes me a great deal of time to express those emotions. Rather, it sits and festers, working its way out, slowly and painfully. Life goes on, so they say. They also say: Carpe Diem. Box of Chocolates. Blah. Blah. Blah. Fuck those platitudes, man. I get the point. But it’s just not that fucking simple.

When I was little, my sister was in a car accident. The windshield shattered and shards of glass flew into her face. While she was recuperating, I remember that she bled glass for weeks afterward. The glass was simply expelled as her face began to heal. Sadness is like that for me. It worms its way out, at its own pace, at its own time. Today, it felt like a big emotional piece fell out of me -- but it was a loss that brought some healing.

That’s the kind of loss I can live with.