Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [74]
The last, of course, a lie.
Nothing could raise my spirits, although, bless her heart, Cate tried. She gave me a book entitled One Thousand Things To Be Happy About—but the only thing that was making me smile was the child handing me the book. The week before Christmas I posted on ASG. And his stocking is hung. No little boy in new red sleepers will sit on the steps until it is time to come downstairs. No young man in a flannel nightshirt will complain that his father is not yet awake. I will not spend my afternoons running my hands over sweaters he might like or my evenings wrapping them. Instead I went today to the nursery; the gardenia at his grave the latest casualty of nature, pansies and lavender for remembrance now in its place. And as I stood there at the counter of the nursery, my arms full, my heart broke, again, as I bought for his grave instead of for his closet. A magnolia now stands where the oak that shaded his grave once stood, the one I liked to think was a part of a thread that started with the oak at Allon-bacuth, the oak of weeping at Deborah’s grave. Nature again, furious, had felled it. Winds more powerful, but less terrible, than the wind that took him. All of this, the oak, the gardenia, the season, the stockings, the tears, it all comes and goes, the wind a fitting metaphor. A young man carves a piece of marble for his headstone; it, too, will pass in time. The only thing that will not change in my life, in generations, is that he is dead. Where is solace, where can you find it, when all there is is mutability and death? Death. The counterpoint of a gay stocking in needlepoint, made years ago in that naive belief that I could make the world gay and perfect for him. I see him sitting on the sofa, that stocking in the curl of his leg, awaiting his turn to discover its contents, laughing at whatever foolishness was in his sister’s stocking, anticipating someone finding his contribution to their stocking. That image, too, is impermanent. If I can carry it with me until at last I too die, as I hope I can, it will die with me, and one more piece of him will be extinguished. The only thing we cannot touch will be the last to stand: he is dead. How I wish that he had children and they had had children and something of him would pass through the years, mocking death’s attempt to cut him short. How I wish…but what use is it? The girl he never kissed, the baby he never held, the stocking he never filled. Death has won. All that is left will fade, will erode, will die. He is beaten, and so am I. The house is still again. I will never become accustomed to the permanence of this silence.
The most faithful stepped up, as I knew they would. But Christmas was having its way with all of us. Sue, whose son Wally—about Wade’s age—had died, resisted her husband’s efforts to celebrate. We do what we do now for others, I wrote. My husband played Santa this year, as he did last year and the year before, for a child care center in the housing projects here. He and his partner provide Christmas for sixty-five children there. The office staff are “Santa’s Helpers” and last year, when Wade worked in his office as a runner, Wade was a Helper. A couple of the kids had clung to him throughout last year’s party, sitting on his lap, playing with his Santa hat. He dearly loved children. This year, without saying so to anyone, I know John was Santa in memory of Wade, giving whatever joy he could. It was a sad day for us, highlighting as it did Wade’s absence, but our sadness is permanent. The joy of Christmas for these children is so fleeting, a bright moment in a life filled with less light than a child’s life should have. For John, maybe for your husband, it was not a celebration in the way you use the word.
And New Year’s Eve was no better. As it approached, I started worrying. This morning’s paper brought the year-end stories. It was a hard year here. Good riddance, they say, to 1996. And I try to find my own feelings in this. Do I want the last year he spoke and ran, the last