#34 This Christmas

It felt strange watching my cousin cry. I had never seen it before. For all the years that I have known him, I had never seen him openly show so much love and affection to his mother like this, now that she was dying. He stroked her cheeks, talking to her, trying to explain to her that we were there to visit.

Just weeks earlier, I had stood by my aunts side watching her cry as she lamented to my father about how she couldn’t use her left hand anymore. Now she couldn’t walk, talk or eat. The cancer in her brain had done its worst in the last few weeks.

A few feet away, sat my wife heavily pregnant with our son. It’s just a matter of weeks before she’s due for labor. My cousin tells me it’d be a great achievement if my aunt could even make it to the New Year. He and his brother have made all the necessary funeral arrangements the weekend before. The same weekend I was busy setting up the baby cot in my room.

My father stayed silent the entire time. He had talked for many weeks about wanting to visit my aunt. But he never did until now. He said his feet and heart were heavy. He said it was hard for him to take what was going on around him. The last time we visited her, he wept silently in the back seat of the car. I made a remark to him - he seemed a lot sadder this time compared to when my grandmother was dying. Perhaps more than my aunts’ life, he was thinking about his own. He had been a very pensive mood of late. Just because we are all destined to die doesn’t make it any easier to take.

I had spent the previous Sunday night talking to my mother for hours. I found out that she too was fearful for her life. She said she wanted to live well past her sixties, but the medication we were making her to take was killing her – so she claims. She wants to move away, live on her own, get a job if possible and taper off her medicine. Her children could not be trusted to take care of her she felt. It hurt a lot to hear those words. Even if I didn’t agree with it, I had to respect that this is how she felt. And so I kept my silence.

After the visit, my brother came up to me and said “I’ve always been very bad at these things…I can never find the right things to say”.

I said to him “I don’t think there ever is a right thing to say in such times. I think being there itself speaks for itself.”

It is very likely that the next time I see my aunt, she will be laying not on a bed but in a coffin.

If that sounds awfully harsh and blunt, it is only because death is like that too. It comes when and how it chooses to. Sometimes slowly like a tree withering away, sometimes abruptly like a trap door under you. Either way, it comes, and there is no refusing.

It’s days away from Christmas. Churches gear up for celebrations, families prepare hearty dinners and people exchange gifts with one another enthusiastically. I find myself in a cocktail of feelings. Sad over the ending of one life, and happy over the start of another. And the rest of us, squarely in between.

Thank you God for the gift of Christmas. It Christ we have mercy unsurpassed, hope everlasting, love supreme. May the world be reminded of this on Christmas day.

Merry Christmas everyone.