Writing these posts has been harder this year than ever before, so that here on Gratitude I’m going to try to combine this Xmas trinity into one post. The writer’s block I’ve been suffering this year is undoubtedly partly due to my aging senior brain, where it gets harder and harder to get that bon mot off the tip of one’s tongue. But it’s been more than that.
One of my favorites among the raft of physicians I’ve acquired as my body disintegrates is my cardiologist, Stuart Barr. He’s a super smart, no nonsense guy, with a great sense of humor, who won me over by being and one of the only physicians I have ever seen who didn’t address my obesity as if they were revealing some expert diagnosis. In one of my first visits with him years ago, he pointed out how lucky I am to have lived so long when I have a serious risk of cardiac disease that killed my father and both of my grandfathers as young men. I wondered about his prognosis for me and I told him that my deepest hope was to be able celebrate Raven’s college graduation, when I would be almost 90 years old. “Not much chance of you making it to 90” he laughed. Maybe so, but one can hope.
Any way you look at it, I am in the late December of my life, which gets more obvious every year, this one particularly when my Best Friend For Life, the amazing Christopher Richard, the only best friend I have ever had, was killed by an aggressive brain tumor. His loss was shattering to me, not just in losing his wisdom and support but also in the way his loss brought my own eminent mortality into horribly sharp focus. As I observed in my essay on Compassion, our grief seems proportional to the emotional distance from those we lose. I felt a similar unbraiding when my dear sister died, with both her and Christopher in my closest ring of relationship. Surprisingly the emptiness of Deena’s loss drew me here to these little girls, and years later here I am: still active, still with most of my wits to share with them. I hope my life after Christopher’s loss will be similarly filled, however short it may be.
I have gotten more life than I ever hoped for. I wish I had had the wisdom to spend more time hoping than fretting. My hopes may be more modest, but much more precious now. I hold on to the hope that I may be here to welcome Dr. Raven Pearl Booth Gray, and am profoundly grateful that I have been around long enough for her to build lifelong memories of our relationship, now I hope the same for Addie.
It is a profound curse of our cognition that we are so obsessed by our desires, then so often inured and ungrateful of their granting. I imagine these Holly Days as rituals to gain perspective on these foolish biases that the essential homeostasis of living makes inevitable. Certainly, the Santa wish lists of the tiny tots with their eyes all aglow are filled with hope, maybe a bit of greed, and surely they all grow up to try to respond generously to the wish lists of their own kids. There is always a letdown when the orgy of consumption that is Christmas passes, which I hoped this ritual of a Holly Day devoted to Gratitude might slake a bit.
I may feel bereft at all that I lost this year, but how can I not be grateful to have made it here know my kids as grown-ups, to experience the delight of my grandchildren, something my father never had. I could barely have hoped for my joy in the blossoming love of Adira and enduring love of my dear Rey. How amazing to have made this far! I am profoundly grateful to providence for the generosity it has shown in allowing these hopes to become reality.
HOLLY DAYS 