Why Grief Calls My Name at Christmas Time
I grew up in a one-church, two-bar town, in the first set of mountains north of Phoenix. It was a quirky little town. It was a mystery to me why my classmates’ dads could fix cars and lay concrete floors, but my dad could only read ancient Greek and Hebrew. He was the pastor in that one church, and for a while had been a regular denizen of one of those bars.
Dianne in her front yard
Then, mercifully, he joined AA when I was four years old. Still, though, his head was generally in the needs of his congregation, or the complexities of Greek verbs, and not the physical exigencies of cars and floors. But there was one night in the year when I could be sure that my dad’s abilities were of some practical use.
Just before Christmas, out where huge boulders had tumbled down the mountainside eons ago, I’d huddle next to my best friend, always in the children’s choir. I'd see my dad’s profile in the candlelight near a palo verde tree, rocking slightly on his feet. Then his booming liturgical voice would say, “And the angel said unto her, ‘Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.” It was the town’s annual Christmas pageant.
As he spoke, one of the older girls would stand on the path just above a huge boulder and stretch out angelic arms. A young woman would be walking underneath, past boulders nestled into the ground. The young woman would feign terror, then awe, while my father’s voice still boomed out the words of Luke’s Gospel. She was always accompanied by the littlest angel, my coveted role. The year I was about the age for it, the women organizing the pageant -- it was always women -- chose a little girl with lovely red curls who had lost her baby sister in one of the valley’s floods. The baby had been born after her father died of cancer. Even I understood why she needed to be the littlest angel instead of me.
So my bestie Dianne and I stayed in the choir. We sang “Away in a Manger,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and when it was all over, everyone, adults and children, belted out “Joy to the World.”
One year we sang “Bring a torch Jeannette, Isabella/Bring a torch to the cradle, run”. It gave two more coveted roles, but we missed them somehow and stayed in the children’s choir. We did remain convinced that Jeannette & Isabella were in the Gospel account - just not the Gospel account that was being read at the time. If we were listening to Matthew, then Jeannette and Isabella were in Luke, surely.
An enormous pile of boulders formed the audience’s bleachers. Opposite those were huge boulders that one’s imagination transformed from an angel’s platform to an inn to a manger. My father’s voice rang out the Christmas narratives from the Gospels as the various actors with their livestock walked across the stage.
All through the pageant, year after year, Dianne and I would stand next to each other, probably for warmth, in the children’s choir. As the mid-winter sun sets against the hills to the west in our valley, it snatches all the warmth from the air, and takes it down beneath the horizon as it sets. Then the mid-winter night grows cold and clear.
It gave me some appreciation for the first-century shepherds out in the fields by night, as well as for my brothers, draped in serapes or whatever blankets were at hand, pretending to be shepherds out with their flocks by night.
The Christmas after I was born, my mother wrapped me in so many blankets she was afraid I couldn’t breathe. “Check the baby! Is she still breathing?” my brother said she repeated all the way through the pageant. I don’t remember that, of course, but I am confident that it was the last time I was warm at the pageant.
The audience was mostly from Phoenix because to pull off such a large production, most of our town had to be in it or helping with it or both. So the audience followed the luminarios out from Phoenix -- paper bags half-filled with sand with lit candles embedded in the sand. The luminarios lined the road out of town on both sides, for miles. I thought they were magic.
They were not. The older students would be released from class, and ride on the back of pickups with the sand and the bags and candles. They’d hop off, fill up a few bags, drop them off with candles, and then hop back on the pickup. When the sand got low, a guy named Montana, the town’s heavy equipment operator, was supposed to come out and fill the pickups with sand again. But it was a long day’s work, and as it stretched out, Montana wanted a drink. So he drove his backhoe to the bar. When they found him at the bar -- everyone knew where to find him by that time -- he was well-settled in and didn't want to leave. No problem -- in our town, most of the ground was sand, with outcroppings of granite. Asphalt covered only the main road through town. So Montana simply went outside, dug a hole with his backhoe, and loaded up another pickup. Right in the middle of the bar’s parking lot.
Dianne and Judy
In between Christmas pageants, Dianne and I faced the woes and joys of childhood together. Our mothers were best friends; I met her first when I was a babe in arms, and she was in her mother’s womb. I spent many an hour playing under the kitchen table with Dianne as our mothers plotted the next community event or way to fund the next school project -- milk for children’s lunches or playground equipment. School money was sparse in Maricopa County then. Probably still is.
My parents were New Englanders, and they packed me off to boarding school in Massachusetts at 14. As the years went by, I lost touch with Dianne. I lost touch with the town as well, and the part of me that had been raised there, as I moved from Massachusetts to Spain to Wisconsin to Mexico and then off into adulthood.
Then one day, when Johan and I were living in Indiana and my children were the age to be in the choir themselves, my brother called me. Dianne’s 13 year old daughter had died in a car crash. I wasn’t able to make it for the funeral, but came home some months later, when the grief and loss had sunk in, terribly.
In those months, Dianne had begun transforming her grief into a profound life change. I do not know how one finds the strength to do that; I admired her deeply for it. She and I went to her family’s cabin in Mexico on that visit, right between the Baja and the Mexican mainland, at the tip of the Sea of Cortez. Afterwards I wrote this poem:
Dianne and the Sea of Cortez
We saw only sea when we sat down. Tiny points of rock
pierced the waves. Water over the sandbar calmed, and the sea
sought its escape in a blue-green strait alongside.
The rocks rose into reefs. A land bridge to the estuary surfaced,
grain by grain. I listened to you as the sea
lost its arrogance, a retreat hidden
in each break of wave on wave.
Sandpipers skipped
along pools of water. A heron
stared at fish in newly-shallowed pools. I listened to you
as the current released its treasures to the sand.
When it was done,
when Venus hung over the new moon and sunset
showed us peaks across the sea, you finished telling me
how your daughter died. And I said,
"I won't be twenty years
coming home again."
I kept my promise. I stayed in touch this time, coming back to visit every few years. We had a different partnership. She still lived in our hometown, and longed for traveling adventures. I yearned to stay put somewhere for awhile. We dreamed of a time we could travel together. East Africa’s Serengeti Plains were at the top of our list. I was sure she and I, after everyone else was gone, would sit under a palo verde tree and reminisce. She had been the first friend in to my life. I had assumed she would be the last one out of my life.
But no. Her sister called me one day and said she was in the hospital, with cancer throughout her abdomen. She was 55. “It doesn’t sound good,” her sister said. In the next few years, filled with chemo treatments and surgery, I came home when I could, in August and January, because that’s when I’d be in the US, back from Russia where my husband and I were living. There is no greater love than visiting someone in August at the far northern reach of the Sonoran Desert.
On the first trip, I called her from the airport. “I’ll be asleep by the time you get here,” she said. “I hope you have a flashlight. The light is out and there are rattlesnakes under the porch.”
I’m home, I thought, I’m home! I knew to pack a flashlight. Rattlesnakes love the sundown in the summer as much as humans do.
Dianne's front door. Rubliev's Trinity in top, center
I drove out to her house. With some trepidation, I stepped onto the porch. I crossed it with my breath in. I opened the door and struggled for the light switch, almost knocking a small frame off the wall. I turned on the light, and realized that the small frame held a print of my very favorite icon from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow - Rubliev’s Trinity, painted in the 15th century. Rubliev somehow used paint, color and space to let the sacred into view.
Dianne’s walls had bright bursts of color, turquoise and gold and oranges tumbling into each other, Mexican-style. She made old wooden pallets into a display case in her backyard. She coaxed flowers out of the desert sand and granite. The town had completely changed; from a quirky town into a quirky suburb with a wealthy retirement center nearby. I was a stranger to it now. But her house, for me, was home.
As she grew weak, she kept more and more to her bed. The bedroom became her world. I noticed on her dresser a framed copy of my poem, and a photo of the two of us at about 5 years old. Her night stand had a small glass version of the Rubliev icon that I had brought her from Moscow.
Just before her sister took me to the airport one last time, Dianne said as a goodbye, “Vaya con Dios.” She had thought carefully about how to say goodbye. Hasta la vista, or do svidaniya, its equivalent in Russian, would not do. We knew we would not see each other again in this life.
I tell you this now because when I hear “Joy to the World,” I do not think of how the Savior reigns. Instead, a grief wells up from deep inside me. When I hear “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” I do not contemplate the town’s deep and dreamless sleep. I am too busy fighting tears.
Judy and her father
My father is gone now as well. Born on Christmas Day, 1919, he died on Good Friday, 2005, a few months after he received his 47-year pin in AA. While I love Christmas day, there’s always a bit of emptiness gnawing at me in the absence of birthday cake and candles, and his deep booming voice that he would turn to gentle often.
I wouldn't give away for a moment my connection with Dianne and with my father, but it does make the holiday season tough. Why pretend otherwise? Jesus of Nazareth did not sugar-coat, which the Pharisees learned to their surprise. Why then should we cover our grief at Christmas with a dusting of candies and sugarplum fairies?
Christmas is to celebrate the birth of the Word become flesh, who said, “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.” So why do many of us have this idea that it’s wrong to feel our emotional truths, including sorrow and loss, at Christmas time?
Although it’s uncomfortable and perplexing, and infuses your being with a sense of helplessness, grieving is a good and life-affirming thing. When grief calls your name, the only thing left to do is answer.
Paul says to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” It applies at Christmas time as well. Jesus honored Mary and Martha’s tears. He will honor yours, as well, in whatever season of the year they fall.
Judy Maurer lives in Portland, OR with her husband Johan. She is a recorded minister in the Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends. She is a member of Camas Friends Church and Moscow Friends Meeting (Russia). She edits this newsletter and is clerk of Sierra-Cascades Coordinating Committee.