Holiday Cheer, Lost and Found
By Sally Kitch
Few people would choose to die during the happiest of holidays, least of all my father. But there we were, three siblings and our spouses, gathered around Dad’s hospital bed, in the jolly holly season of 1995, as he awoke from the respirator coma he’d been in for days. It was our job to tell him bad news: He would not recover.
Dad was as surprised and dismayed hearing this as we were telling him. His bright blue eyes scanned our faces for an explanation: How could this be? The answer seemed straightforward: severely reduced lung function from exacerbated pulmonary fibrosis. There was no cure. But that answer omitted so much.
To the doctors at the Washington Hospital Center, Dad was an old man with a fatal disease—what can you expect? But to us, he was the same cogent, vital person he had been all our lives. Before that September, his illness had been invisible. At 82, he was even engaged to be married, for heaven’s sake, and his fiancée, Doris, was 12 years his junior! Losing such a person, still so lively and alert, seemed impossible.
But possible it was. Our anguish and disbelief could not beat the odds. Dad died on December 28.
For me, the preceding two weeks, including Christmas Day, were a blur: dashes through airports; heart-wrenching decisions; endlessly flowing tears; catnaps caught on waiting-room chairs; frigid car rides between hospital and Dad’s apartment, where my family stayed; and precious, sometimes silly, conversations with my dying father in the few overnight hours left of his life. While he still breathed, I basked in his wit and warmth, which had always lit up my heart.
At the same time, the contrast between the so-called joyous season and the overwhelming shock and grief slowly engulfing me could not have been greater. This holiday, meant to brighten winter’s deepest darkness, a time of joy, of birth and new beginnings, felt like a farce. The brave little tree in my brother’s living room, bedecked with ornaments and lights before anyone realized death would come calling, mocked our despair.
The tree’s cheeriness reassured the children, but to me it made a ludicrous backdrop to the sad unfolding of those terrible days. In its glow we learned that Doris had broken her hip. She could not travel from Florida to bid Dad good-bye; the hopeful couple would never meet again. After Dad’s life slipped away, we gathered reluctantly by the tree’s taunting light to discuss funeral arrangements.
In the ensuing weeks and months, I wondered if my family and I would ever again enjoy the holidays or decorate a tree. Maybe holiday cheer is all tinsel and fakery, I thought. Maybe Scrooge and the Grinch had it right.
Slowly, though, I recognized that holiday gifts may come in strange packages. Dad’s dying days had brought my siblings and our families together for the first time in years. We shared difficult decisions and deep emotions; we found new honesty in our common grief. Likewise, I began to find holiday joy in happy memories: Dad’s brilliant smile as he relished a joke; Dad singing my high school fight song to wake me every (frigging) morning; Dad cradling my floppy newborn twins and delighting them with games and stories as they grew.
And, finally, I discovered that grief can inspire celebration. As I toasted Dad every December 28th, I could, over time, lift my glass less with sorrow than with joy and enduring gratitude—for his life and the life he inspired in me. Dad’s now-distant glow again lights up my heart, as well as the season.
This essay is part of our series on the topic “Holidays?”
Sally Kitch is University and Regents' Professor of Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is founding director of ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research and of the Humanities Lab.