My Ex, His Mother, His Truck, and Her Tree: On Holiday Mourning

by Emma Spies // @paxiomatic

I have never, as an adult, had a Christmas tree. There are a number of reasons for this, I think. When I was nineteen, I was on the edge of my first psychological breakdown and didn't care. At twenty, I was in a mental hospital, where I vaguely remember small trees sitting on the counter of the nurse's station. At twenty-one, in 2006, I was living on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi, and I spent Christmas Day trying to sleep under the awning of a drugstore as freezing rain fell on the silent city. I resented Christmas for a long time after that. My childhood memories, all of lovely, warm, happy holidays, seemed too far away, and I had utterly failed at adult life, at building my own traditions, finding my own happiness. So no more Christmas for me. 

My late ex-husband didn't like it either. We met when he was forty-seven, four years sober, and I was twenty-one and still homeless. His name was Carl, and he had a handsome weather-beaten face, a heavy Southern accent, and a happy laugh. I moved in with him and we began a relationship, one that was enormously complicated by our basic incompatibility, age difference, and the fact that I was a deeply closeted lesbian. But for a while, we had a decent life together. He cooked heavy foods like fried chicken and french fries; we went fishing in the country at sunrise; we went for walks in the evening. More than anything, though, Carl liked to take me for drives in his beloved 1980 Ford F-150, a huge, creaky, terrifying truck he had purchased for $800. We would drive around the city, listening to Van Morrison, exchanging memories of homelessness, addiction, and childhood, eventually falling into silence, arms hanging out the windows to catch the balmy breeze, each flooded with waves of wistfulness, regret, and gratitude. 

The coldest drive I remember was December 23, 2007. I was feeling restless and suggested we drive just to a gas station for cheap coffee. We ended up in North Jackson, which hadn't changed since the 1970s — old diners, factories, ranch houses — and stopped at a convenience store across the street from the Salvation Army. There was a wreath on the door. We sat quietly in the truck, sipping our coffee, and Carl suddenly said, "My mother loved Christmas." I turned, jolted not only by the sadness in his voice, but by the reverence with which he said "Christmas."

Her name was Betty Dorris, neé Laird, a soft-spoken housewife, a devoted but unhappy mother who passed her afternoons lying down in dark rooms, pill bottle always on the bedside table. She spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. She would decorate her room for Christmas every year: lights, wreaths, poinsettias, small statues of angels, a tiny tree with a tiny star on top. She was religious and liked to go to church, but her beliefs were gentle and joyful. And every year, even as she was dying, she wrote Christmas cards to everyone she knew. Her handwriting stayed neat and beautiful and dignified, never passing into that shaky, spidery handwriting of the elderly and ill. She wrote cards to all her doctors and nurses, to fellow patients, to her church friends and bridge friends and far-flung acquaintances she remembered from her bygone life with her husband. Those cards were desperate flares, her attempts to reach over the walls of time and of loss, but they caught no one's attention. She lived alone and, eventually, died alone. 

Carl began sobbing, hands gripping the steering wheel, head down, shoulders heaving. I knew I was watching him mourn not only his mother, but all those Christmases that he could've had with her, that slipped by silently. His opiate addiction was at its peak then, and he had been too sick and dysfunctional — often homeless himself — to visit her. He knew she asked about him: the doctors told him after. She even sent him Christmas cards, sadly them mailed to the last address he'd been able to give her, but he never got them. 

Holidays aren't about gifts, as we revel in saying, but they also aren't, at their core, about family or food or decorations or even plain old Love. They are about marking time. Not only the passage of another year, but the ways we measure ourselves against it all. What kind of son had Carl been? And why? How had I ended up under that awning? And why? By forcing us to mark time, Christmas forces us to remember.

I want to believe there's consolation in reminiscence, that mourning can be cleansing when it's set against green and red lights and holiday songs and a sense of impending renewal. I want to believe that. But when time never moves forward for us, it can never be properly marked and peacefully released. Instead we are the ones marked. Holidays repeat endlessly. There are no new carols. Traces accumulate. We stay in the truck. We cry. We're still in the truck. The wreath is still there. We're still alone.