019: First Christmas After, and After
on true love, books, and loss
Way back in the day, in the vintage 1990’s, I formed a writer’s group with three Dartmouth friends: Brian Bajari, Peter Barnes, and David Lewis Neel. Brian, like me, was a recently graduated English major, Peter was a current Philosophy major, and David was a Ph.D candidate in Mathematics. David, of the four of us, was and still is the king of readers, a person with a lifelong, voracious and joyful habit of reading across disciplines and genres. In the years since our first meetings as a writer’s group, I have watched how David’s intellectual engagement with books has strengthened his heart and soul, giving him a resilience that allowed him to survive a devastating personal loss with a phenomenal level of grace and love.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary storytelling, so I asked David to take over the writing this week because he has a Christmas story to tell that is strong enough and brave enough to salve our 2020-weary, Covid-exhausted, winter-tired souls. —Courtney
First Christmas After, and After
It all led to me reading those last 80 pages sitting next to her grave, on a cool spring day with the sun’s late beams still struggling through the trees behind me.
***
Have you thought about the holidays?
I miss her every day. Every hour. I shrugged. I don’t think Christmas is going to make much difference.
Christmas. I’d had 46 of them by then. It would have been Lina’s 41st. Though of course it was not the same sort of holiday in her Kosovar Albanian youth, inside Yugoslavia. She celebrated mostly alone in those years after she marched into the one Catholic Church in town and asked to know more about Jesus. She’d eagerly taken to my family’s extravagant Christmas-gift-giving bacchanal, which the rest of us had rationalized somehow by a combination of “It’s Jesus’ birthday” and “Mom would be sad if we made her cut back.” I’d worried the first time she joined us in 2009, how it would look to a former Young Pioneer. She beamed as the gifts piled higher and higher around her on the couch.
Have you thought about the holidays?
I miss her every day. I don’t think Christmas is going to affect that too much.
Even after twice through this exchange, one week apart, once each with my therapist and my grief counselor, I still believed it. Possibly I managed to believe it clear through Thanksgiving, 2019, even, though if so only because I skipped that family gathering. (I’d begun to understand by then how much I used to lean on her for these chaotic and overwhelming events.)
The breaking point came a week or so after that skipped Thanksgiving, when my parents came for the yearly “deck the halls” that we began in 2015 when Lina and I had just moved into our second Capitol Hill apartment together (only about a year and half after moving into our first Capitol Hill apartment together). It would have been (should have been) our second Christmas in our new house, after the Moses Lake Christmas, and the two Christmases in that second Capitol Hill apartment. First, her not being there. Second, my parents and I admitted to each other later, we all kept thinking of how tired she had been in 2018, how quiet, how shadowed by the bad news delivered in the doctor’s office a couple weeks earlier. We all were. But it was unique for her.
That first “deck the halls” after, in the course of digging for various decorations and ornaments we also unearthed a cat toy (gnawed faux mouse on leather cord at end of stick), Aki’s favorite, that had been lost. I swirled it past him and around him and over him, my mother aiming my phone at us to capture it. Only after viewing that video did its echo with Aki’s arrival (at that second Capitol Hill apartment, in December 2016) reach me, and I could remember baby Aki, mere hours after arriving in our life, clumsily leaping and clawing at this very toy. I showed my mother the video. We went back to searching for ornaments that she was sure were missing, but that we later discovered already on the tree. Mom remembered Lina’s tired instructions on where to place the first few, and how she lay down on the couch after a while.
After decorating, after setting up the overly expensive nativity scene we’d bought last year for her to enjoy for years, after my parents hugged me and set out on their half-hour drive home in the dark, as I sat down and looked around at the four cats that were now my entire family, yes, then it became clear that I should have listened to the therapists and grief counselors when they asked their gentle question.
Have you thought about the holidays?
***
If ever there were a year I could be excused for taking a pass on gift-giving, it was Christmas, 2019. Lina and I had played it out different ways over the years. My nieces were certainly excited once Aunt Lina took over responsibility for their gift selection and they began receiving stylish dresses or leather jackets. One year we focused on experiences, and all the nieces and nephews were to be taken to events. (It occurs to me that I still owe my nephews a minor league hockey game. The nieces got their ballet.) That last Christmas we had, 2018, in our new house, we were both so depleted that all I managed to do was make hand-written bookmarks with quotes from various authors we liked, and a promise to have nieces and nephews over in pairs and threes to spend a day or two with us at our new house.
They got the bookmarks at least.
***
Lina was a woman with a powerful, almost bodily relationship with literature. She’d open a newly acquired book and stick her nose deep into the pages, inhaling its scent. She was also a teacher, like me, and so I kept thinking about the Lina Syllabus. I’d been thinking about it since losing her. A list of books that she treasured, or had helped her, delighted her, challenged her. One of the many ways I kept reckoning with who she was and how she changed me. A good idea for a project. But a difficult one.
So perhaps I should give books from the syllabus to my family for this Christmas. Books that formed her, or just ones that spooked her or made her laugh. This idea arrived with just barely enough time to visit Magus Books, where we’d wandered the narrow towering aisles together on more than one occasion, order a few books online, visit Elliott Bay Book Company (the Capitol Hill re-location overrun as usual in the pre-Christmas rush — I still have a photo of her in the arched tunnel of the basement of the original Pioneer Square location — and oh the memories of drifting through that space, knowing she was there somewhere, knowing that around each corner I might see her...).
There were some tricky decisions. Is Middlemarch too old for the oldest niece? Is there any book Lina liked that makes sense for any of the rambunctious trio of redhead boys my youngest sister birthed? Even the oldest nephew, 18, moody and leftist, son of my middle-child sister, is he already past the perfect Vonnegut moment? And what about Borges, who among my family members would be up for the dizzying peculiarity of that favorite of hers?
Through this churn of indecision, I kept amassing possible books, trusting that when it came time to wrap them I would be able to rearrange them, if necessary, to match with the recipients in some plausible way. I may even have written down two columns, with family members in one and books in the other, and tried drawing lines across to get a matching. But it wasn’t until that first Christmas Day without her (presents with my family is on Boxing Day) that I finally sat down, and pretty late at that, to wrap them all in brown paper that I cut from grocery bags since I’d purchased no gift wrap.
We used to have a tradition, Lina and I, of watching the Lord of the Rings films (extended editions, obviously) each Christmas. This began all the way back, even that first Christmas we were together, 2008. (We may even have each brought it into our relationship from before, but it had become thoroughly our own viewing tradition as a couple, on the same level as Malick’s The New World at Thanksgiving and the Buffy episode “Fear Itself” on Halloween.) I’d even tracked the DVDs down so that during that (unwitting last) Christmas season together (though that’s a lie — she’s still with me always) we could go through them again. Looking back, it’s clear that her focus and stamina for such things was already ebbing. We did make it through the first two films that holiday season. But we left Sam and Frodo stranded at the border of Mordor.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever watch any of those movies again. But that Christmas night surrounded by books Lina loved, books that shaped her, with the quiet and dark outside, and my cats slumbering contentedly on various pieces of furniture that we chose together, it felt, all at once, rather perfect to start The Return of the King. Start it at least. See how far I could get.
A real question, how far could I get? Among the milder effects, sure, of her death. But I find that most of the shows we watched together I cannot continue watching. Several that we truly loved: icy horror and human frailty in The Terror, Korean historical zombie epic in Kingdom. Even as deeply as we loved the first three seasons of Fargo (how she wept over the animated “I can help!” robot in Season 3) even that can’t bring me back. In this After it became clear that something essential to that enjoyment had become enmeshed, was an emergent effect of watching with her. Quality of certain art can find no purchase, not without the possibility of her delight there beside me, not without the possibility of her chanting, “one more! one more!” at the end of an episode.
So I must have been touched by some optimistic Spirit of Christmas to even press play on The Return of the King. But then it also didn’t need to fully occupy my attention — that went to the books and the wrapping — and I’d need to sleep long before it ended (surely), starting it around 11 as I was.
Though fashioning acceptable wrapping paper from the brown paper bags was a challenge to my scissor dexterity, the true profound challenge was the issue of inscription. First, simply to mark with permanent ink a book still gives me a tremor. My whole family used to tease me for how there was never the least sign when one of my books had been read by me, so obsessively careful was I with the cover and pages and spine. My uncle who only saw me once or twice a year would tease me, sitting on Grandma's green-floral couch holding his paperback (Cussler or Ludlum) up to his face with the pages mere millimeters apart. Even when I would attempt deep challenging books of philosophy or theology, for years I would trace my painstaking way through them but refuse to mark them up. Lina it was, finally, who set me free from this, with her focus on the reading of the book, the physical book itself, as only the occasion for the passage through the mind of the words marked there.
But of course it was more than that, too, wasn’t it? We can read in that youthful reverence for the physical book a yearning for immortality, to preserve the body housing the text from moth that doth corrupt and thieves that break in and steal—or turn down the corner of a page. But I’d reached an age where the end of all things becomes visible. With a love, found at last and despite long odds, who now faced the mortality so forcefully conjured, always, by the word “cancer”. Lina’s more playful and less reverent relationship with these textual bodies helped free me. I would mark these books that marked Lina, and my marking of these books itself marks a way that Lina marked me.
Even with that shifted relationship to books as objects, that change that Lina marked on me, how was I to manage to mark, in pen, time and again, the paper in the front leaf of each of those books? Probably only the feeling, in that dark of night, with the various life-and-death struggles playing out before me on the TV she helped me carry up the stairs to my apartment (the first one on Capitol Hill) almost 12 years earlier, of a sort of sacramental connectedness could have brought me to write that many words in the front covers of that many books.
Sigrid Undset. George Orwell. Kurt Vonnegut. Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Isak Dinesen, WG Sebald, TH White. (Not one but two women writing under men’s names.) I wrote of how Lina devoured a great Nordic feast of a book in her two-person book club with her old friend from the coffee shop. I wrote of how she loved the clarity of Orwell’s prose and his familiarity with the reality of living so near the edge. I shared how many times she told me of her love for Jane and for Rochester, how she knew it was troubling, but how she couldn’t help what it stirred in her. (How many times did we watch Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska speak of strings attached to ribs and women who have just as much a spirit and independent will as a man?) After each inscription I set about wrapping that book, one at a time, labeling carefully the intended recipient. The filmed Tolkien speeches on screen, with the odes to the afterlife and the bravery in the face of certain death and the power of companionship to bring comfort even as doom rises and surrounds. The darkness outside, deep, as if this brightly lit room with me sitting on the floor, well into Boxing Day morning by now, was the only light in some thousand-mile radius. Surely I am the only one still stirring, writing, wrapping, weeping.
***
I worried, briefly, arriving at Christmas at my parents on Boxing Day, that perhaps this was too much. Lina was always clear that she found performative grief deeply troubling, even offensive. It means I always pause and consider. (I have done it over this piece, too. Am still doing it.) But I was the first to arrive, and my father was running a last errand. So I spoke and cried with my mother, and she assured me this would be good.
And it was. I sat on the same couch as always. Pain. Our circle was low by one. Pain. And what became clear as we worked our way, in the traditional fashion, around the circle clockwise, one present at a time, was that this had been the right way to handle gift-giving this year. Of course, there would have been no hiding from this absence, this irreparable tear in the fabric of What Should Be. But this pulled her back in, invited her, fastened her in a more emblematic full-spectrum way than the snapshot memories of those previous few Christmases, a little less energy each year of treatment and slowed-but-not-stopped metastatic activity.
Or anyway that’s the story we told each other.
I do still believe it.
***
In early 2020, as my niece began reading Jane Eyre, so did my mother. We all agreed what fun it would be to watch Lina’s blu-ray once we’d all finished the novel. Mom finished the book in a night or two. She falls asleep in the middle of Law & Order most nights, but she read, wide-eyed, about Jane deep into the night, unable to stop, so pleased by how much she enjoyed it all these years later. (How many times had I traced my fingers along the spine of the battered pocket paperback edition on my parents’ “college” brick-and-board bookshelf in the living room, alongside Adam Bede, Don Quixote, and Erewhon?)
It took me a while longer follow them into Jane’s story. I started it sometime in March, perhaps. It was part of a longer arc of reading the books that were her favorites that I had simply never quite gotten to. Some of the delay was nothing more than the simple fact that my to-read list is always massive. It stretches well beyond the end of even the most optimistic lifespan. It is also true that I had hoped to locate Lina’s own copy in one of the many book boxes still in our garage. But I wonder, too, if there had been some hesitation to engage these texts that I knew were so key. What if I didn’t like them? What new sort of loss might lurk there? From almost the first instant of our romance, literature played such a key role, tossing Bernhard and Roth and Jelinek back and forth at each other. She quoted the Bronfman-playing-Prokofiev scene from The Human Stain when we were gchatting about death, about a week before our first date. (“Nobody is dying, nobody – not if Bronfman has anything to say about it.”) Quite possibly in response to me musing about Glenn Gould’s role in The Loser. That thrill to discover our mutual affection for misanthropic and musically attuned writers. So how not to feel some risk, now, after, when venturing into one of her treasured texts?
But here’s the thing: what a gift. To have so many of her key texts left unread? To have this supply, this stockpile to feed this ongoing conversation, ongoing apprehension of her? I had edited her horror novel, still with her help, back before Christmas 2018. So I could gasp when, not long before Christmas 2019, I recognized Gogol’s influence on her prose and rough humor when I read “Viy” from her battered Vintage paperback. I could thrill to see in Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales that weirdly intimate detachment and narrative patience she would also sometimes use. What connections or revelations might still lie hidden in Middlemarch or The Other?
And what connections in Jane Eyre? From so long before.
With all this at stake it meant, of course, that it had to be slowly read. Tasted and savored. I knew the big twist, I knew the general contours of the ending. But that voice, Jane’s voice, and hearing Lina in it, and Jane in Lina retrospectively — Jane that indomitable one, Jane that ally of the vulnerable and forgotten, Jane who despite all the ways the world fails to recognize it still knows her worth, knows it and insists upon it — that was an unexpected and powerful effect.
I read it very slowly, usually just a few pages in bed, before sleep.
***
I read some pages aloud when I visited Lina’s grave on that first anniversary of her death in April. I can’t recall if I’d yet reached the scene where Jane’s consumptive friend is fading, fading . . .
But I was back again three weeks later, sitting there and reading again, some 70 or 80 pages from the end. The sun gave warmth, for one of the first times that spring, and so I decided that my slow savoring could now end. I would finish the book here.
Perhaps you know the book well. Perhaps you know what then was soon to arrive for me. When Jane returns to find Thornfield Hall burned down, when she finds Rochester scorched and scarred by the flames, when she finally reveals herself and begins the 38th chapter with the famous line, “Reader, I married him.” Not long after that Jane tells also of receiving word from her friend Diana, who says in the letter that she will give Jane time to “get over the honey-moon” and then she will visit.
Sitting there in the cemetery, on page 677 of my edition, here is what I read next:
‘She had better not wait till then, Jane,’ said Mr. Rochester, when I read her letter to him; ‘if she does, she will be too late, for our honey-moon will shine our life-long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.’
***
We’d been together nine or ten years, and found ourselves at a Seattle party. Our hands stayed close, our bodies, too, all the usual easy affections. During one of our brief forays into separate conversations, an old friend who’d not seen her in years grasped her upper arm and murmured to her how much she liked watching us, to be reminded what a delight it always is, that mad hunger for each other’s flesh and very being in those first few weeks of falling madly in love. Lina laughed and spoke of our decade. And later, on the drive home, quiet pride in her voice when she told me how we fooled her friend.
So perhaps you will believe me when I say, all due respect to Charlotte Brontë, but no, Rochester, you are far too pessimistic in your attempt at romantically extravagant thinking. No, not even over this grave, Reader, I assure you, do those honey-moon beams show the least hint of fading.
Lina Books for Christmas 2019
Middlemarch
Jane Eyre
Mother Night
The Once and Future King
Babette’s Feast and Other Stories
Kristin Lavransdatter
The End of the Affair
Seven Gothic Tales
The Emigrants
Down and Out in Paris and London
David Lewis Neel is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Seattle University.
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