It is ten o’clock at night on December 23rd. My sister Emily is making cookies in our mother’s kitchen, while Mum putters around with last minute craft things. Someone, I feel, should be making a move to the door, preparing to drive to Manchester to pick Hannah up from her flight, or to Concord, if she flew to Logan and took a bus north.
As much as I know this isn’t what we’re doing, it’s in my marrow and feels more wrong to be missing this ritual than much else has in the last five months and two days.
This is the time of year when Hannah’s New England roots came through. Except for one Christmas she was in Colorado working retail at a ski resort and couldn’t come back East, one Christmas when Mom and Dad and Emily came out to Colorado for the Christmas when I was living with Hannah and Will, and the one Christmas when Team Taylor did Denmark, Hannah has always—dutifully, if occasionally squawking about the realities that travel at this time of year really sucks—bought a ticket and flown home for Christmas. Depending on ski practice schedule, Saco’s camp reservation or other Pet sitting program, and anything important in New Hampshire or Colorado, we counted on Hannah to be here for any stretch of time between December 23 and January 2. Once, she drove here and back with Saco, because it was important that he meet his whole family, including our grandmother.
Hannah is my best friend, and although we talked an average minimum of twice a day for the last fourteen years, this last week of December is the longest stretch of time I or Emily or Mom or Dad could count on seeing her. There was always another visit or two throughout the year, but this was our time. We’re skipping Christmas a bit this year—a celebration put together by people with broken hearts, who are exhausted all the time, who cannot function in normal life, who are all missing the vital organ that Hannah is/was in our personal cosmology would just be a lot of work and only emphasize the loss.
I think a lot about my life feeling like a smile missing teeth or a face with an eye punched out. Dressing all that pain up with tinsel and bells and trees and carols makes the wound seem ugly and unlovable. I do love my grief, because the raw ache, the tears that stream out of my eyes and into my ears when I lie down, the way that Minions make my chest hurt, all of this is a delightfully stubborn testament to my great sister. The ways in which Christmas, unless you take control of it, can seek to impose an ironclad Norman Rockwell/Martha Stewart/Hallmark ideology of tidy perfection and magical happiness are bad enough when life is just normal. When you are grieving, it’s astronomically impossible and deeply hurtful—I find—to have to go about in a world that is so hollowly, aggressively cheerful. The banality of being wished “Merry Christmas” by grocery store clerks, when I’ve had in-depth conversations about the nausea I feel about unwrapping presents or putting oranges in large socks or any of the thousand little actions that Christmas entails, because every little ritual that Hannah has been a part of, her absence feels larger than any other meaning the rite could possibly have…it’s been a tough month.
And only in the last few days, since I’ve packed my own bags and driven from Maine to New Hampshire, has it started to fully sink in that there will be no trip to the airport to retrieve Hannah this year. It’s, I see now, my favorite ritual and one I didn’t realize was sacred and necessary until now.
In the time I’ve taken to write this, I could almost have driven to Manchester Airport, and be waiting curbside while idiotically texting that I can see her through the windows, and she seems to be getting closer to the car. There is no wiry hug through her puffy coats, no tale of crying babies or excellent people watching or travails of almost breaking down in the Eisenhower Tunnel. We are not clambering into the car, barreling to Hopkinton while plotting out exactly when it’ll be “ideal, simply ideal” to watch White Christmas. I have not been making last minute recon trips to local stores to see what can be found to supplement or replace whatever she’s ordered to be delivered to the house, but may not have arrived. There has not been an endearingly annoyed conversation between Mom and Emily and I about what to give Hannah—given that Hannah bought things she wanted when she wanted them, that she wanted things we didn’t understand existed often, or that she didn’t think were going to be “fun” for anyone else to give her, Hannah could be hard to find a good present for. There was no teary call as she dropped Saco off at “camp,” and needed to be reassured she was not a terrible person for abandoning her Best Thing so she could come eat chocolate and make jokes with our grandmother.
I know it is impossible, but I am trying to not imagine that cars in the driveway aren’t an airport shuttle van and Hannah is going to miraculously pop out of one, with her giant duffle bag, laugh her beautiful giggle, apologize for the confusion, and be here and make everything better as she always has (or at least, always since she stopped being a grouchy teenager.) I can, logically, wrap my head around the fact that I won’t see Hannah this week. What melts me is trying to absorb the worse thought that it’s not just this week, not just this Christmas, but all of every day for the rest of my life.
People have told me that the first holiday after a loss is the hardest. I know that. We were flattened the first Christmas without my dad. He loved Christmas more and more every year, and my wonderful uncle had passed away not two weeks before that Christmas. It all made my family seem very small and rickety. The strength of surviving does not feel like strength—it feels like you could blow away in a light breeze, or just take a nap for days, if only you could fall asleep. We all got through that Christmas, through the holidays, although it was not pretty. I remember Hannah, particularly, curled up in fetal position sobbing under the kitchen table, because that’s where Darby was, and sometimes, a good dog is the only thing that won’t make the awful worse.
And then last year—the third without Dad—Mom and Hannah and Emily and Darby and I spent Christmas afternoon skiing on local trails. It was a bright and beautiful day, one of the best Christmases ever, and it felt like a grand huzzah of finding our new footing as a family without Dad, while also getting ready for Emily to marry Alex and mingle their families into something new and special.
I know humans can survive terrible things. The litany of pain in the world brings me to my knees, often—every one of the 300 people killed in the Indonesian tsunami yesterday is as special and dear and vital to their people as Hannah is to me. And, those yet, those of us not felled by accident and disaster and disease, we keep going. I don’t find this inspiring, so much as a grim process of biology. The world is also lovely—there was an atlas of the world at the library I used to work at that was so beautiful I’d tear up looking through its pages at the marvels of deltas and mountains and ecosystems and urban planning and humanity—but beauty and pain aren’t opposites and don’t cancel each other out so much as spill into each other. "Your sister would want you to be happy," as someone said to me recently, doesn't change the fact that I am not happy without her.
Hannah, I know, would not want anyone to be miserable (unless they were mean to dogs, other people, or were otherwise cruel idiots), but the idea of ever being really joyful at this time of year, without her, feels like the most callous imagining. Part of the brokenheartedness I carry is for the life she loved and doesn’t get to live anymore. There are things about this season, about how Team Taylor does Christmas that Hannah loved, and if there is a wherever where she is in any way now, there probably isn’t Scandinavian coffee cake with cardamom, or luminara along snowy walkways, or white grapefruits, or any of the other thousand little markers that we use this week to tell our people we love them, to let ourselves be held in and reminded of the love of others.
I’m not ready to do the things that Hannah loved as a way to honor her. It makes me want to vomit with grief to understand again and again that my dear Burda is only memories and honorings. Perhaps, in the alleged better and easier years to come, these actions will be possible, or perhaps it won’t be.
As a reader, as a writer, I want a narrative. I want the beginning, middle and end, the loose things tied up, whodunnit unmasked, theses answered, moral achieved. Grief doesn’t give that tidiness. There isn’t a linear plot structure with crisis and resolution, just a lot of pain and the strongest friends in the world who stand by with hankies and jokes and food and hikes and silence and words and surprise postal gifts and spare beds and all the other things that hold my marionette strings taut and functional these still hard times.
Hold your people, these celebration days. And thank you for holding me and mine and Hannah in your hearts. I would be even more truly lost without your love.
