Christmas Carol

I wrote this in 2004, when both my parents were still alive. My mother died in 2009, and my father in 2016. I would write it differently today, but I'm keeping it as a record of how I felt at the time. It covers a lot of the reasons I want to write, and think, further about my family and how mental illness may have affected us. 

My parents are coming for Christmas again. Each year I assume it will be the last, but they keep surprising me: My father agrees to drive the 300 miles, my mother insists she can make it up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. I offer to go there, and make Christmas for them at their house, but they keep saying no; they want to come here. 

I instituted the celebration of Christmas at my house the year my mother lost both of her remaining siblings. My brother and sister were both already dead; my grandmother, aunts and uncles -- all of the people who had once come to our house for one holiday observance or another were gone, and the living room, where we had decorated trees together for 35 years, seemed hollow, haunted with absence. I did it for me: I couldn't stand another Christmas surrounded by ghosts. 

So I started holding Christmas at my apartment, despite my failure to become the conventional daughter -- no husband, no kids, no house in the suburbs, and a job history so checkered my parents don't even bother trying to remember what I do for a living. I took Christmas over, and remade it into something warm, and crowded, noisy, busy, bustling, generous: I invited a dozen of my friends, Jewish, or estranged from their families for one reason or another, to share Christmas dinner with us. To drown out the silences, fill in the spaces so the ghosts can't sit down. 

My family is a bad one, there's no getting around it. My brother and sister were both drug addicts -- he, heroin, she, amphetamine -- and not cozy, middle-class ones, either: both spent more time dealing and using than they ever did at conventional jobs, and both had lengthy periods of disability before their drugs of choice killed them. My sister had a stroke from bacterial endocarditis, the disease of dirty needles, which left her paralyzed on one side and aphasic. She eventually died of a heart attack, when the cocaine she continued to inhale and the methedrine she continued to inject blew out her artificial heart valve, at the age of 32. My brother lived for several years in SROs in Manhattan, was robbed and beaten, and died of AIDS at 45. Both had served time. 

And you can blame the 60s or chance or free will, but it's pretty hard to look at their lives and not think about the phrase "dysfunctional family". If families can be said to have a function, it is probably somewhere in the realm of raising children to live productive, constructive lives, hold jobs, find love, that sort of thing. Cliché or no, "dysfunctional" is one way to describe the family I came from, and once you go there, it's hard not to start blaming the parents. 

And I do blame my parents. My sister was a sociopath, which is fine as far as it goes in explaining the chaos and terror that characterized my life as her little sister and punching bag, but where did she come from? My brother was massively depressed most of his life, and thought himself clever when he discovered drugs and promiscuous sex to deal with the pain. (I will always remember a conversation we had in the 1970s when he told me, gleefully, that he and his friends tried to sleep with as many new men as possible every weekend, and when I asked if he wasn't worried about venereal disease, he laughed at my prudishness and said, "We go get tested once a month. If we have VD, we get some penicillin. It's not a big deal.") And it is hard not to look in his upbringing for reasons why he was so vulnerable, so incapable of self-preservation. 

And, like I said, I do blame my parents. They were, at the very least, incapable of dealing with the responsibilities of the particular children they had. Even if my sister was born with mental problems, surely they could have done something more when she started sneaking out of the house at age 10, smoking at age 11, getting arrested at age 13? When my brother came to them for help with his heroin addiction, surely they could have thought of something smarter to do than to give him a fistful of money and a car and send him back to New York to buy heroin? He told them he would come back and let them wean him off the drug. He wrecked the car outside Binghamton and proceeded on to New York by bus, where he took advantage of the fact that he and my father share a name to wire himself money via Western Union on my father's credit cards for a month, until Western Union one day phoned my dad to ask him if he wanted this transfer done like all the others. It was, of course, the first my father had heard of it ... and the last he ever heard of my brother, who did not ask to see my parents when he learned he was dying. 

So why do I invite them here for Christmas? In the end, it is two things. One is vanity on my part: I want to be someone who has sympathy for them, who has kindness, who has decency. I cannot bear the story of the elderly couple with two dead children whose remaining child refuses them. I cannot bear to be that refusing child. 

And the second is that, for all the disorder, for all their bewilderment, for all their cluelessness in our upbringing, they always made for us a Christmas that was worth looking forward to the whole year. We always had a real tree with lights and ornaments, some of them from my father's parents' trees, some from my mother's. And it wasn't until I was 15 that my father failed to make it home in time to decorate, so that my brother and I carefully strung the lights and draped the bead ropes, just so, just as they always went. It is, now, one of my tenderest memories of my brother, the two of us working in near-silence, lit only by the glow off the strings of colored lights. I cannot help it that this memory exists because my father was out drinking, cannot help that his business partner brought him home around midnight on Christmas Eve, totally drunk—my father is usually a very sweet and sentimental drunk, and he was this night as well, telling everybody how much he loved them. His partner said he thought it would be a bad Christmas present to let my father drive home in that condition, and that has a sweetness to it, too. We live in a more prudish time, and maybe that's right — maybe my brother and sister would be alive, and sane, today if he hadn't been the kind of father to come home at midnight on Christmas Eve plastered. But for me, the salient, or at least competing, fact is that he waited until his youngest child was 15 before he blew it, and in blowing it taught my brother and I that we were ready to carry on the traditions ourselves. You take what sweetness you can get; I don't have another childhood to remember. 

My parents weren't up to the task of raising us, the kids they got, in the time we lived. I don't know why. Both of them were badly scarred by the traumas of their generation — the Depression, World War II. My mother once mentioned in passing that a quarter of the boys in their high school graduating class were killed in the war. She tells stories about being quarantined for scarlet fever, and her brother lying ill for over a year, and her fear as a child that if she made too much noise playing, people would die. My father once got very drunk and told me stories about being a prisoner of war of the Japanese, stories he has never even acknowledged when sober. He was made to carry bags of cement, and the dust was so bad, so relentless, that he believes the crusts that form in his nostrils today are still filled with that cement dust. He talks sometimes about helping to unload unexploded ordnance from Navy ships in Australia, making sure the torpedoes weren't jostled as the cranes raised them out of the holds. So what do I know, really, about psychic trauma? Who am I to judge these battered souls? 

I toyed for several years with the idea of "confronting" them, as was a popular psychiatric technique a decade ago. But finally I decided that there was nothing, really, that I could say, or threaten, that would "confront" them more starkly with their failures as parents than the deaths of their two elder children. Whatever they were capable of doing in response to that, they'd already done. 

My mother has emphysema, and late-stage congestive heart failure. She's on oxygen 24 hours a day, and barely walks anymore, preferring to scoot around her kitchen on an office chair with wheels. My father, in a reversal neither of them would have predicted, takes care of her, shopping for groceries, maintaining her oxygen equipment, making sure she takes her pills, driving her to doctor's appointments. In what grows an ever more fragile commitment to the life they have led for more than 50 years, she still cooks, but she is burning dinner more, and my father, for the first time in his life, sometimes complains about the food. They play Tetris, do crossword puzzles, watch sports and old movies. 

They still drive me crazy. I have, no surprise here, recurrent major depression. I've had lots of therapy, I take medication, and it still takes me a week to get over a visit with them, including a couple of days where I can't get out of bed. They don't know this, of course; they just think I am skittish and cranky. I don't think they realize my thin skin is what you get if you don't use cigarettes and television and alcohol to numb you. My mother will ask me questions the answers to which would break her heart, testing to see if I'll still protect her from the truth, which is that I believe she ruined my life, and killed my brother and sister, almost as certainly as if she had held a gun to their heads. My father, who is a bit more understanding, but only a bit, tries to help me keep my silence, and cuts her off when the testing gets too desperate, the answers too hard to resist. I do not tell him that he left us alone with her, that she was crazy even then, that the house he fled every night was the house to which he abandoned us, who could not flee. I don't tell him she felt trapped, too, and betrayed by his absences, which she took out on us. 

I don't know if I hate them; or rather, I hate them, but it is mixed with other things. When they visit, I hope I can hang on to my temper until they leave; when they're gone I hope I can hang on to the act until they die. Just keep faking until it doesn't matter anymore. Two years ago I converted to Judaism. Another thing they don't know. When they are gone, I'll spend Christmas as Jews do all over this great land of ours — eating Chinese food and going to the movies. 

But until then, on December 25, I light up the tree, clean up the debris of presents from the morning, and fill my house with friends, with warmth, and light, and noise. I cook a big dinner, and give out presents, in gratitude to my friends who bring, along with desserts and wine, their spouses, their kids, their happy marriages and happy families and happy lives. To cover up what's missing in us. To drown out the ghosts, and my rage, and the things we can never, never tell each other. 

November 2004