A Lifetime Ago that Feels Like Yesterday

Even in California, November brings a change of season. At least right now, it is a little cooler at night. I still try to sit outside as the hummingbirds get their last fill of nectar before the early darkness requires them to go into a tree stasis, but often I need a sweatshirt to be comfortable. Early darkness indeed for November by virtue of the turning back of the clock to shorten the day. Thanksgiving is only two weeks away. The Christmas Tree is already up in the Grove and advertising is geared to the yearly merchandising that has marginal, if any, relation to the event that gives it impetus, the birth of Christ.

While I am faithful to, even at times passionate, about the religious dimensions of this time of year, the period from now until very close to the Spring, has always been a bit difficult for me. I am, by nature, as are so many people, in need of extended sunlight. My moods simply are better from Spring through to the descending of the Fall. Then there is the fact, which I say truly without rancor, that my experience of the holiday season, as a child, was not particularly joy filled. No one's fault, really. It was the stuff of the normal dysfunction of any family, to which I was probably unduly sensitive. Alcohol filled Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with my parents and their in laws, my aunts and uncles, evoked usually buried hurts, causing untoward, sometimes angry repartee and sarcasm. To the degree my father contributed to these dialogues, while my mother watched quietly and icily at the gathering, was the degree of tension and concomitant retribution later when we clambered back over the roof to our third of the tripartite building where most of my mother's family lived. My mother managed to make her silence toward my father a shout which he could not tolerate. My father's effort to discuss whatever verbal, as he called it, "lese majeste" he had committed via a comment directed towards one of her sisters came to naught until he blew, threw a few things and left for the night with the yearly mention of a divorce that he opined should have occurred long ago. My mother did not seem particularly moved by his emotion. As to reassuring me, who could not miss the proceedings in a one bedroom apartment, I don't recall that was part of her repertoire. But the next day, sometime, he'd be back and somehow we would return to the state of peaceful co-existence. So the holiday season had a second strike against it. And then the third.

When I was 18 at the same time of the year, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  She died of it 14 months later. It was a cold dark early evening on the ides of November, when I got the call from my Dad while I was at school that I needed to get to the hospital to which he had taken her. She remained in a coma for the next ten days and never regained consciousness. She died just before Thanksgiving Day. I am grateful that in the preceding months, in some paradoxical way that will never be explainable to me in this life, she went from difficult and cold to soft and warm toward not only me, but everyone in her life. But still, November and the approaching holidays cast a pall even when I am not deliberately thinking of the past or of its losses. And as the things of those days replay in my mind, unbidden, that they were some 40 and 50 years ago seems impossible. The memories and the feelings are as fresh as yesterday's.

You know how people say they dream of their dead relatives, mothers, fathers, all the time? Well, I have only had one dream about my mother, and it was maybe 20 years ago. I am at a large party. It is hard to see anything much beyond the standing figures, talking, and drinking and laughing.  I am walking between the figures, on my way to another room. As the crowd breaks around me, almost in the exact middle of the scene, in that room to which I am directing myself is a woman sitting on a chair or a couch, dressed perfectly, though it is too hazy for me to say what exactly she is wearing. Her legs are crossed in perfect Barbizon model style. I know this woman, but how can I? She is older perhaps 70. Her hair is gray, in a longer short cut, brushed back. She smiles at me. It is my mother, but not the woman who died at 48, but the one she might have been had she lived.  That dream has held me all these years. Perhaps she did approve of me. Perhaps, freed of purgatory (for I feel she had purgatory on earth with whatever emotional thing weighed her down), she is finally happy, which to me means she is with God. Perhaps she and my father--he gone now nearly ten years-- realize how foolish were their human grudges and demands of the universe that could never be molded into a perfection reserved only for God's Heaven. And now, perhaps, as I realize they are safe in God's Hands, I am less discomfited by the time of year and willing to engage in all of the celebrations of the season with a soupcon of joy.