The words in the title above are not my words. They are the words of author Lois Lowry taken from an interview in the New Yorker Magazine. I took them down as they ring so true to me. There are times that I need to write. Writing provides a means of letting out feelings and thoughts that I feel like if I don’t get down on paper will just bust right through me. That is what I am doing here. I’m mending my heart.

This past Christmas 2021, was my worst Christmas yet, a close runner up to 1985 when my newborn son spent his first Christmas in the hospital. The difference was this one was spent mostly alone.  The Christmases of excess food, Mom and Dad, sisters and brothers, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren just a memory. You see, Covid –  the Grinch of this Christmas, and I hate to even make Covid seem like some funny holiday character for it is not, made its way into our home after 18 months of keeping it out. First infecting my husband, then my youngest son, then the oldest, and then me. I cried when I heard the word: positive. Funny how this word normally connected with good thoughts, good news, was now the word you didn’t want to hear. It’s quite scary, but Covid appears  like a character from a fairy tale, it dresses up like someone kind and close to you and joins in at family parties and gatherings and then it slips you the poison apple. That’s how it got us. My family met for a holiday show where my musician son was performing at a restaurant and one of my other sons returning from college. With a backdrop of Christmas in the air, we kissed and hugged and ate together. Then a day later, as we were about to gather for my middle son’s birthday, it started. Guess it starts different for different people, but we had the tomahawk straight through your scull headache with accompanying dizziness,  followed by a sore throat and/or cough and fever. Some poison apple. I was so afraid when I heard the news, like someone hearing that the enemy was out there and thinking you were safe until they are at your door and in your house! Oh I could go on, as my mind races back to my reading of Gone With the Wind and strong willed Scarlet thinking that would never happen to her, Oh Fiddle-de-de indeed! We moved the positive patients upstairs to isolation, and me playing the role of of Scarlet in this one, rolled up my sleeves and did the work needed to be done. The Christmas Tree stayed lit, the presents stayed wrapped, and I cried as I watched It’s a Wonderful Life all alone on Christmas Eve. With a good bottle of red wine as my only  companion I spoke to the pictures of family on the book shelf sort of wishing that I would have my own A Christmas Carol sleep that night. My one son, the musician who had been exposed to the positive family member put himself in his own isolation and spent Christmas Eve and Christmas night at a crappy motor inn, more reasons for me to cry. Always looking for a good song to write, I suggested that one to him, Christmas at a Crappy Hotel, you never know? It just broke my heart as I could only remember Christmas Eves and Christmas nights filled with people, food, love and fun. Now all of us by ourselves, some sick and some watching as the Covid tide moved in.

I slept on the couch with the tree lit and woke on a dreary Christmas Day. A day usually filled with excitement and a too-much-to-be-done agenda took on an entirely new shape.  I poured some coffee and spent a long time staring out the window and I wrote so my heart wouldn’t break. On Christmas my sons came over and we lit a fire in the yard, keeping a distance from each other as we exchanged Merry Christmases and next year will be better. Note – That is what we said to each other last year! We were like a scene from a depression era movie, Christmas by the Fire Pit – no gifts, no tree, just some beer and hope –  hope that next year would indeed be better. I packed them up with some food to take back to the crappy motor inn and the other to his room at his house, (where his roommates also had covid) and with one more I love You, went our ways. I cried again.

The holiday moved on and it was soon after that I too became ill with the tomahawk headache, the sore troat and fever and the realization that you can’t stop the tide. From the start of  December to the beginning of this new year mostly everyone I know, who like me had fought that battle of keeping the enemy at bay, eventually heard the negative outcome of positive. My heart heals as I write this and my family and I tentatively look forward to a Martin Luther King Jr. Christmas this year and a new appreciation of gathering as a family.  

Here is what I wrote that Christmas morning:

As I look out my window

on trees with no leaves

and a damp cold morning out there,

There are no presents under the tree

No Christmas lights on

Yet I feel it – 

Christmas is inside of me.

My mother and father

the tree that kept falling down,

my brother and sisters

all with our pajamas on.

The excitement of my children

as they open up gifts

that Christmas morning feeling

it’s inside of me.

This Christmas is different

no family or friends

we wait for a healing

a means to the end.

I am all alone

my children are too

but maybe it not just that,

but’s what inside of you.

The true meaning of Christmas

the reason is found

for Christ has been born

love and hope abound.