My mom gifted me that year a shadow box.

“This is a sharing about how I have navigated the holidays over the years with an acknowledgment that we are all doing the very best we can…”

Hi, my name is Ken Breniman.  This is a sharing about how I have navigated the holidays over the years with an acknowledgment that we are all doing the very best we can…

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Catchphrases like this still catch me differently now than before the seasonally jarring news of my mother’s stage 4 cancer over 25 years ago.

Arriving home for the holidays after spending a semester abroad as a junior in college, I was greeted by my dad’s wintry hug and solemn expression on his weathered face.  

From the airport, we drove directly to a regional hospital, the reunion with my mom was immaculately wrapped with a blue-green curtain and had the sterile smells of institutional dread. I can still remember seeing her gaunty legs stuffed into compression stockings.

The twelve days of Christmas went by in a blizzardy whirl, like a ginormous snow globe endlessly joggled, never a chance to let my feet touch the icy ground.

As the unattended live tree in our home lost its needles and luster, so too did my mom begin to fade. There was no Hallmark made for TV movie happy ending in sight.

This was a time before today’s era of Black Friday frenzied sales, yet my mind did feel a hopeless despair of what can I salvage, what can I hold on to in the midst of an unfathomable nightmare before Christmas.

My mom gifted me that year a shadow box. It holds a poetic blessing and continues to sit upon my altar all these years later.    This I could hold on to.  When she died on Valentine’s day, I was acutely numbed to realize the irony of another holiday marked to deliver to my motherless heart more sorrow than a box of melted chocolates.

Years later, I lean into these memories with care and kindness for my younger self.  While I will never know what it is like to celebrate the holiday season with my aging mother, I have come to appreciate her presence in my life in a way that makes sense to those who seem to savor Christmas, keeping their decorations up long into the New Year.   She is in my warm salty tears that still flow at times.  She is in the cold autumn fall when I see the leaves begin to submit to painting the forest with radiant acceptance.  She is here.  She is there.  She really is everywhere I go.  I do not need a holiday to remind me of my grief just like I do not look to the pre-Labor Day Christmas tree displays in stores to help manifest Joy to the World.  

It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and this is a phrase of the year that has schooled my soul.  What once was like breathing frigid wind, I have taught my lungs to warm the grief as it fills me, and to thank the grief as it flows out.  I cannot say it was a gift I would ever want for myself or wish for anyone else.  I do now know, however, it is a precious present I was given wrapped in layers and layers of childhood memories.  Like a toddler who ends up playing with the gift wrapping and package instead of the actual toy, at 53 years old, I am humbled to not know what the actual present is.  I can now hold my mom, her unlived years infuse me to live as fully as I can.  I can celebrate and grieve as deeply as I might.  I do trust somehow, someway, there are even more gifts to discover as I journey toward and through this next holiday season.