The Most _____ Time of the Year

The grief within all the cheer, and the brightness in the dark days.

The air is finally chill here in the Northeast and the holiday season is underway, with all its enforced cheer. It is hard to fend off the ubiquitous messaging that the path to happiness is consumption and more consumption; somehow, I found myself thinking I really *needed* to buy red pajamas for the children and myself on Black Friday, as if our life were a series of corporation-staged photographs. I’ve been trying instead to tunnel back to my child brain, which (very briefly) had a different orientation to the holidays: excitement about the gifts that would appear under the tree, to be sure, but also a sense of lightness that a being called Santa existed who would bring us gifts just for being ourselves, a lightness at all the palpable merriment of holiday gatherings with my aunts and uncles and grandparents when they were all still young. That is the feeling everyone is trying to sell: The sense that by exerting our human will to come together, we can make a gaudy, fleeting bubble within the dark short days of winter.

Holly in snow always makes me think of grief amidst the holidays. Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

In truth, grief—or maybe sorrow—is always part of what we now call “the holidays.” Those lights are, after all, a fending off—of depression, nihilism, nothingness. Amidst the onslaught of mandatory fun, I wanted to make room for that— “to hold space”! — because at this time of year, inevitably, sorrow creeps up on me, a somatic vibe I can’t shake. This is the time of year that my mother, who lived with colon cancer for three years, entered her final decline, eventually dying at the age of 55, on Christmas Day in 2008. ( I wrote about her and about grief in my memoir The Long Goodbye, an excerpt of which you can read in The New Yorker if you would like.) Sixteen years might seem like a long time, but every year, as the leaves let go of the trees— “bare ruined choirs,” as Shakespeare called those wintry branches—a part of me time travels right back to that long fall, taking her to the hospital and back again, watching over her amongst all the Christmas decorations she had sewed or crafted or chosen, and which we dutifully put up.

The frailty of a human bond is what can make us “love more strong,” as Shakespeare put it.

My life looks very different than it did in 2008, and the holidays can be truly joyful when you have young kids—their excitement is infectious. Yesterday, the six-year-old asked if we could put a SimpliSafe alarm on the chimney so he could “catch Santa and meet him.” Hard not to laugh in joy, but also hard to live with a black ribbon of grief amidst all the sociability. If winter is a chilly dark time for you, it may be that changing everything up is in order. I’ve tried to identify my “max” party number and instead of attending all of them, have scheduled some of holiday activities that restore me by connecting me to time past: the boys and I are attending a Yale Camerata advent concert (singing with other people!); instead of doing our usual weekend running around we’ve been staying home and making tissue-paper snowflakes.

Around the time my mother realized she was dying—after she got disqualified from an experimental treatment at New York Presbyterian—I drove her from the hospital back to Connecticut. As we were on the highway she suddenly asked me to pull off; she wanted to go to the Cloisters, to look at “very old things.” She told me that this is how she planned to spend her remaining time, what brought her comfort: being with us, looking a very old things, and studying an enormous fir that was outside the living room where her hospital bed was. Her inoculation, her recompense, is mine: I’m reading old things, walking in the park near me and studying the bare maples, and listening to renaissance carols.

So, to those of you in the club we never wished to join, here’s to some recompense this season. I’ve been reading William Maxwell’s sweet-bitter They Came Like Swallows; the opening is so insightful and precise about being a child, loving a mother, and foreshadowing loss. Somehow, acknowledging grief, making it part of the ritual, is the only way I know how to really enjoy this helter-skelter season. I’m curious what helps you.

My mother riding in Vermont in 1972.

I’ll leave you with some poems, those talismans that connect us to pain and relieve it through music. If the Christmas playlist starts to feel relentless, perhaps a dose of Shakespeare’s clear-eyed diagnosis of the most acute human paradox—that we love knowing that what we love will be erased and lost—will be just the thing. Sonnet 73, “That time of year thous mayst in me behold,” is about the feelings roused by this waning time of year, and never fails to do it for me. It may be the ur-holiday poem or song, a paean to our most human strength (our will to love) and an elegy for our human frailty. In it, the speaker—who is older—addresses the fair youth, a handsome, carelessly young person with whom the speaker has an intense friendship, perhaps a romantic or sexual one:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The time in the poem poem narrows from season (“that time of year”) to a single night—a “black night” that “doth take away” to a moment of death—enacting the loss and disappearance of time that it evokes. And then it does what Shakespeare’s sonnets always do, which is to offer a final couplet that enacts a further paradox, using rhyme to help make the oxymoron feel more “chiming” than it often really is. Here, the paradox is that the frailty of a human bond is precisely what can make us “love more strong.”

I’ve also been reading and re-reading Jack Gilbert’s beautiful and troubling poem “Finding Something,” about taking care of his wife Michiko as she died from cancer, which puts into words one of the strange realities of this dark time of year, and any proximity to life entering or leaving the world—that you feel you are close to “something,” something important. Gilbert was committed to living “authentically,” if we can use that word, in a highly inauthentic world. After receiving the Yale Younger Poets award in 1962 and achieving unusual fame for a debut poet, with flashy spreads about him in Vogue and Glamour, he turned his back on it to move to Europe where he eked out an existence. In a 2005 piece I described him as “the poet who stands outside his own time, practicing a poetics of purity in an ever more cacophonous world—a lyrical ghost from a literary world that never came to be.” Here, he writes, of Michiko:

She will lean against my leg as she sits
so as not to fall over in her weakness.
How strange and fine to get so near to it.
The arches of her feet are like voices
of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,
where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.

“How strange and fine to get so near it” gives me a chill every time I read it, not least because the poem—as Gilbert evidently understands—risks aestheticizing his lover’s death. (And to some degree does commit that sin.) But in doing so, it speaks to a kind of pre-rational part of us that is moved by death’s proximity, the way that it clears the underbrush out and lets essential human commitments shine through.

A little more locally, Katherine May wrote, in her own Substack post about this strange time year, that “[t]here is a fluency between ourselves and the darkness, an understanding of the short wire between laughter and tears.” A very apt description. Like her, I like to decorate early. Yesterday, I put up holly and Christmas lights on the mantle, to have something bright around me to make the love more strong, even if our hearts are as “helpless as crushed birds.” Amidst all that demands our grief, all the senseless harm, there are also these poems and songs and very old things to look at.