Christmas? Well. Maybe. The greeting cards have not been flowing in. We didn't send any this year, and I feel guilty each time one of the rare personal cards arrives. (We seem to get lots of them from the car dealership, the dentist, our respective schools--so personal!) The card I always look forward to most is the one from Mike and Pam, featuring their two children, Jordan and Andy. I keep them, and it's almost a miracle to line them up and watch the children grow up. This year, Jordan is a young woman. Andy still has a bit of childhood in his face, but I can tell that in a year or two, he'll also have lost that "kid" look. Wasn't it just yesterday that he was the world's biggest Thomas the Tank Engine fan? Since I see them so seldom, the changes in their faces that doubtless Mike and Pam hardly notice because of their day-to-day interaction seem monumental to me.
It happens with the older folk too. I can recall very clearly not having seen my mother-in-law for several months, and the first thing I noticed when I saw her was that her throat had developed that stringiness we laughingly used to call "turkey neck" (until it happened to us!) Since moving to Michigan, I notice the changes in her voice. She sounds tremulous and thin-voiced, as if she goes days without talking to anyone.
Speaking of Mimi (what the grandkids and I call her), we'll be sleeping at her house Saturday night. She'll either have it too hot or so cold that we'll huddle together all night for warmth. We're better than we used to be about letting her know that the temperature is uncomfortable. I worry that she doesn't "feel" the temperature the way she should. She also obsesses over the cost of electricity and gas. Yes, she's on a fixed income, but we should all have such a healthy fixed income. She could live lavishly off the income from her investments. She and her husband did what our generation did not do--planned for the future. They scrimped and saved so that they would have enough money for retirement. And indeed, for a few years, they did enjoy themselves--cruises, vacations, even England. But then my father-in-law's health suddenly ended. He had never been a sickly person, and it seemed that his poor health took him by surprise. He kept trying to do what he'd done before--until he couldn't get up by himself when he fell. I still question the diagnosis of ALS, but only because I suspect he also had Alzheimer's. Whatever the diagnosis, his decline was rapid, and we have been without him now since 2002.
That's the hardest part of Christmas, now that I'm older--not the faces we DO see, and their many changes--but the faces we DON'T see. It takes as long to visit the graveyards to share our Christmas greetings as it does to visit the living. The family portraits might have just as many people in them, thanks to the addition of grandchildren, great grandchildren, new nieces and nephews--but the faces we miss most are not there. Perhaps that is the reason I write and paint. Even when I'm gone, something of me will remain. I wish I had more of my own parents to keep with me, but poor people, uneducated people, they don't leave much behind.
I hope Mike and Pam will continue to send me their photo Christmas cards, even after Jordan and Andy marry and have children of their own. In this transient digital age, it's so nice to have a personal Christmas card, one I can keep and look at whenever I feel like it. It makes me really happy. Dr. S.
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