Month: December 2023

“I will think of you in the coming days as you tread new ground.” A friend and colleague wrote those words into the Christmas card they sent me. I find them so apt in this moment. 

I’ve not written here about my father’s death in March. The first months of 2023 were a blur of caregiving with my brothers as we navigated our father’s end-of-life journey. When he died, I told myself that I wasn’t going to do anything I didn’t have to do for six months. As that grace period neared its end in September, I gave myself an extension through the end of the year. 

My intention was to give myself permission to say no to anything extra, anything beyond my bandwidth. To give myself space. But I think subconsciously I also put on hold the processing of the grief. As the holidays arrived, the grace period came to a close as well. And I find myself having to actively do the work. 

This was the first holiday season without parents or grandparents. While the holidays (and life) hasn’t been the same since our mother died twelve years ago, I’ve felt what I’ve described as “the space above me” more keenly. That space is the vacancy of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. I’m the oldest of my siblings and now I’m the oldest period. It’s the new ground. I’ve felt the weight of that space from the moment our father died. 

I’ve replayed lots of Christmases in my head over the past several weeks. I’ve a large extended family and spent many holidays as part of the youngest generation of the family while in the company of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and their siblings. Aunts, uncles, and cousins and cousins and cousins. I know it’s not everyone who had the opportunity to spend actual quality with three generations of family. 

The traditional holiday activities are all quite different now. Again, they have been for a while and continue to evolve. And so, my siblings and I are trying to figure out what stays, what gets repurposed, and what gets released. 

My dad was one of six. Five of those six had kids, at least three each. There are 18 of us in that generation. Needless to say, for my paternal grandmother, Meemaw, (and her mother, Great Ma) gift giving was a complicated and expensive affair, particularly on a fixed income in Appalachia. So, there was a formula. Little kids got puzzles. Teens got soaps and lotions. You knew you’d graduated to adulthood when you either got a bottle of Old Spice or Oil of Olay. These gifts usually were wrapped in aluminum foil with a stick-on bow. And while these were not the fanciest gifts under the tree, you always knew that Meemaw and Great Ma remembered each and every one of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. 

My siblings and I stopped exchanging gifts after our mother died. She was Christmas, the holidays, and, as our dad often said, “the source of all the good things in our family.” Gifts took on new meaning for us and we focused on trying to create for the next generation the magic of the Christmases we remember. 

But this year after Christmas dinner, my brother Jordan handed me a small box wrapped in aluminum foil. He had one for my brother Jacob, too. Inside the foil was a box of Old Spice. I took it as an acknowledgment of how we’re fashioning and refashioning family traditions. How we’re remembering where we’ve been and where we’re going as we tread this new ground.