The loneliness of Christmas

This blog has been silent for a bit because we've been out of the country, visiting our daughter in Taiwan. As I began sorting through the photos from our trip, I found this one and wanted to share it.

I shot this picture before I met the woman and her dog; we were all waiting in the Vancouver BC airport on Christmas Day for trips to visit family. Her story, I thought, was particularly poignant.

She was from South Carolina, with a VERY intense southern accent, and she had come to Vancouver to visit her 3 grandchildren (first time in a year) on December 22. But on Christmas morning she received a call from the care facility where her mother resides in Carolina, leaving word that her mom, who suffers from advanced Alzheimers, had fallen and broken her hip.

She had left immediately for the airport, and had been on the phone most of the day, either to the doctors caring for her mother or to the airlines, attempting to book a flight out. But the best she could do was a morning flight on the 26th, so she was stuck in the airport all day Christmas Day, worried about her mom and missing her daughter and grandchildren, comforted by her little dog, who was very well-behaved.

Christmas is so difficult, for so many people. Whether you're with your family and you wish you weren't, or you're missing family members, or your family doesn't live up to the Donna Reed/Father Knows Best illusions you grew up with, or you aren't with family, or you have no family -- whatever your particular challenge is, Christmas seems to force us into awareness of our failure to connect.

It's like that Bing Crosby classic: "I'll be home for Christmas." I keep picturing the soldiers in Iraq singing that one and dreaming of whatever families and traditions they left behind in the states. And I picture my daughter in Taiwan, in her chilly little unheated apartment, kneeling at the base of the tiny fake tree we sent her, breathing in the scent of Chinese cooking that permeates her neighborhood and remembering Christmas in the Northwest, where the air is so rich with the aroma of evergreens.

Maybe it's just the jetlag. I understand that Christmas is about rebirth, and new life, and hope, and light in the darkness; it's a time for hope and for promises, for re-uniting and re-membering.

But soon we'll all be taking down the trees, packing up ornaments and stockings, returning to our normal busy lives. And what lingers, I think; is not the hope, but rather sadness: a sadness for all the separations, all the losses, all the broken families in the world.