This is a column I have wanted to write for 20 years.
Some of you have been through it. Some of you may be experiencing it this holiday. For most of the rest, it is inevitable.
Someone you love, someone who’s been a part of every holiday celebration for as long as you can remember, will be dying. It will be their last holiday with the gang and you’ll know it.
It won’t be like the scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold- referring to his uncle’s despicable behavior- opines that if “he keeps this up, it will be his last Christmas”.
No, there will be no doubt about the situation- and there is only one way to deal with it.
For the sake of the person whose time has come, don’t let allow the illness to become an elephant in the room that will ruin your- and most importantly- the holiday for the loved one who is sick.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1989, my Dad and I delivered a homemade turkey dinner to my Mom at Chicago’s Christ hospital. Only weeks before, she had been deemed “clear” of lung cancer and we’d celebrated her incredible victory following months of suffering through chemo and radiation treatment.
A valued employee of the FDIC (yes, banks were in trouble in the 80s, too) Mom went back to her job around the first of November that year, excited to resume her life.
We made Christmas plans. My wife was pregnant with Janelle and we planned to travel to Chicago, hoping for a white Christmas and warm fuzzies as we celebrated the holiday and Mom’s reprieve from the Grim Reaper.
Just 2 weeks after returning to work, Mom started feeling fatigued. At first we thought (and hoped) it was just her trying to do too much too quickly after her battle. Two days before Thanksgiving, the doctors admitted her to the hospital for tests.
On Thanksgiving night, while Mom took a break to freshen up, Dad and I wandered to the nurse’s station where we spotted x-rays pinned to a bulletin board. We asked the male attendant behind the counter about the one bearing the name “Budell” and he pointed to white spots in her brain. He’d assumed, incorrectly, we were aware of the situation- that her cancer had cleared the lung but metastasized to the brain.
Thanksgiving night or not, I called my friend Barry Baumel of the prestigious Baumel-Eisner Institute and asked what this meant- and to tell me the truth.
“It means she has about 3 months to live, Greg. I’m so sorry”.
I’ll tell you this. The last thing my mother would allow is the ruination of everyone’s Christmas by dying before or during the holiday. Our Christmas plans remained in place. I flew my sisters in from California before Thanksgiving weekend ended and we decorated the house to the 9s with all the touches, so when Mom came home the next week the place would be fully decked out and cheery as it was every Christmas time.
We were all gathered again in Chicago a week before Christmas. I was sitting next to Mom when she grabbed her purse and handed me a wad of 20s, instructing me to pick out a nice maternity dress for my wife so she could make it her Christmas present to Michele. I did as asked and did it well. Mom praised my fashion choice, and thanked me because what life she had left in her, was devoted to making it through the holiday. She wanted business as usual but was too weak to leave the house for shopping.
The biggest challenge became this question- and it is an awkward one- “what do you give to someone for their last Christmas?”. We discussed it amongst ourselves and agreed that giving her something she would never use was dumb- and a lie, but what were our choices? Luckily, as we watched TV a couple days before Christmas, a commercial came on that changed the holiday. It was a TV spot for a grocery store offering a special on jumbo shrimp.
Matter-of-factly, Mom announced “I have always wanted to get a giant plate of those big shrimp and stuff myself senseless!”
In the time it takes to say “jump shrimp is an oxymoron”, I was out the door and at that store. I had them weigh 30 pounds of the frozen shrimp, and added a six pack of cocktail sauce, brought it home, wrapped it and stashed the box in the garage. The temperature was well below freezing so storage was not an issue.
Christmas morning, we were gathered around the tree like any other Christmas morning, eventually sitting in a debris field of wrapping paper.
“You ready for yours Mom?”, I asked.
“Now what did you go and do?”, she demanded. “I told you I didn’t want anything- just all of you here was enough!”.
I retrieved the box from the garage and placed it in her lap. Mom’s eyes widened as she unveiled the jumbo shrimp orgy she’d mentioned wistfully a few days before.
My Mom, like most Moms (including Moms reading this column), would give up whatever she had to if one of the kids wanted something badly (and it wasn’t unreasonable).
It was her time to splurge, and did she ever!
When we gathered in Chicago the next year, we did up the house, put up the tree and piled up gifts as if Mom was there- as she would have wanted it- and had a wonderful holiday albeit with numerous pangs. Our Christmas dinner began with shrimp cocktail, a gesture that “included” Mom.
There is no handbook for these situations. I only know what worked for the Budells. Celebrate what you have now and throw the elephant in the room out as best you can.
Come to think of it, that’s a great way to make every Christmas the best Christmas ever.
