It was the least Christmassy Christmas I had known.
The only decorations were a three-foot tree a friend dropped off and cards that lined my parents’ mantel.
I had gone there nearly three weeks earlier when I got the call.
“It’s Dad,” Mom said, sounding like she would break. “He’s in the hospital with pneumonia.”
It was a sure death sentence for an 82-year-old with pulmonary fibrosis. I flew out immediately. And though Dad eventually, miraculously, recovered, the damage to his lungs was substantial. We brought him home to live out his final weeks, a homecoming that was its own miracle, another story for another time.
Christmas came, and so did brutal pain that I couldn’t beat down even with the largest morphine doses hospice would allow. Dad, a former NHL hockey player who had never complained about pain even after open heart surgery, writhed and begged for relief.
My eight and thirteen-year-old sons were there, which brought its own kind of hard, their sadness bumping up against Dad’s pain. Our Christmas church service was reading the birth story from the Bible my parents got as a wedding gift 57 years before. Dinner consisted of store-bought appetizers I pulled out of the freezer. The boys opened a few small gifts. There were hardly any around the tiny tree, but none of us cared much about gifts that year. At least not the material kind.
It was the most basic, peeled-back Christmas even my depression-era parents had ever experienced.
But without the earthly layers and distractions, the real Christmas was more obvious than ever. The center of this day - the baby, the Christ - shone bright like that star in the sky guiding the shepherds and wise men. God was crystal clear in this time. Jesus was closer than ever - birth, death, and everlasting life wrapped in the same painful, beautiful package.
It was not an earthly Christmas at all, but it was a heavenly one. Less and more at the same time. It was the deep ache of loss and the hope and light of a savior born to change death. It was to put hope not just in keeping a dear one alive, but in their dying, too.
The day after Christmas, Dad went Home.
If you’re in the midst of loss, this season stripped down in waning days as you hold tight to someone you love or mourn the end of his life, I am so deeply sorry. If you’re wondering how so much pain can coexist with Christmas, I understand. And I hope this jumble of words, this sharing of heart, might help in some way.
I used to think this was the worst time of year to lose someone I love. But when I settle into that deeper part of myself - God within me - I know for sure the brutal Christmas that ushered us toward Dad’s death was the most Christ-masy Christmas I’ve ever had, one that made me see every Christmas since more fully, deeply, and gratefully. One that makes me see death differently, too, as it mingles with life.
That was my lasting gift of this season. I pray it will be yours, too.