23. The Ghosts of Christmas Past

For Mario and I, Christmas sort of died along with our great loves.

Gregory and I used to take Helena out to a Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree.

Gregory didn’t participate in the decorating, but Helena and I would hang upon the boughs first lights, then the ornaments and all the memories locked inside them: A wooden lighthouse from a New England friend. A tiny Noah’s ark leftover from my marriage to Helena’s dad. A miniature sleigh full of miniature foodstuffs from a foodie at work. A pine cone that Helena had decorated with ribbons and spangles.

For the most part, these have sat, undisturbed, in a box year after year since Gregory died. It wasn’t that Helena and I made less out of Christmas. It’s just that it didn’t feel the same. We didn’t want to go Christmas tree hunting by ourselves, and it wasn’t as much fun to hang the stockings with everyone’s names, including the cats, down the banister. And, anyway, when Helena entered her militant environmental stage, live trees were out of the question.

It was only a couple of years ago that some of the decorations came out of their tissue cocoons. The occasion was the first time Mario and I hosted a Christmas Eve get-together with blended family and friends. We couldn’t have them over without a Christmas tree, could we?

So, for the first time since Izzy died, Mario rooted around in the attic for their sturdy artificial tree. We combined our ornaments, and the tree came to life, complete with an angel. I can’t say we did this with a lot of joy. But it has gotten easier, as we have gently coaxed the ritual from the shadows of loss.


Christmas Eve 2006, we again created a feast: Mario’s exquisite Calabrian eggplant parmesan, which starts with slicing and grilling eight eggplant. A “happy” pastured turkey cooked according to Martha Stewart’s cheesecloth-draped method. Rich, brown gravy made from drippings (an art I have finally mastered). Yukon Gold potatoes not mashed, but riced to ethereal lightness, with melted butter and milk gently folded in. Izzy’s sister brought broccoli salad with almonds, grapes and bacon, as well as a modern squash casserole. And a new friend, who’s in her second holiday season in the “tunnel,” brought chocolate-chip-laced brandy balls for dessert. Her soulmate, like Gregory and Izzy, was far too young when he died just over a year ago.

Whether by design or accident at this year’s dinner – Mario made the place cards – Violet, who lost her husband of 53 years to Alzheimer’s earlier this year, sat directly across from the new friend, next to another new friend, and with Izzy’s sister and Mario’s 90-plus aunt. I, too, was at this table.

A lively conversation covered a landscape of topics: from missing New York City, to whiches and thats (‘happens when writers and editors talk), to expectations of an art museum, to the lamentable dearth of walking in our city and the urine-tainted cars of our mass public transit. And then, the conversation turned to loss.

Perhaps it was the wine. Or the Christmas tree angel, perched above our heads. Perhaps it was the comfort of connections discovered and discourse made easy. Whatever the reason, we dipped collectively into the intimacy of shared loss, if only for a moment, as we exchanged parts of our stories.

Honestly, I think this is how we’re supposed to grieve. To share a moment, or a reflection, and just be heard and understood. It’s not as if you have to dissect the whole process. It’s just making connections. But in our culture, if you haven’t experienced loss, you don’t know how to react. And so what could become an opportunity for healing instead becomes just awkward. So we who have been through it have learned not to bring loss up, or to apologize when we do.

For this group, that wasn’t the case. We raised our glasses filled with wine from the common decanter of grief, sisters in the communion of love found and forever lost.

And then, with kaleidoscopic perfection, the conversation morphed again, swirling naturally away from the topic, our hearts warmed and faces aglow.

22. Glimpsing the Love - and Secret Compartments

Mario keeps prodding me to talk more about our respective mates and food. After all, the title of this blog is, “Table for Four, Dinner for Two.” And there are many food moments still to share. For, indeed, while eating and dining and gathering 'round a table are central to everyone’s lives, they are the heart and soul of existence for foodies like us.

I, on the other hand, am pulled toward telling you more of the back story, of who Gregory was and the twist and turns of his life and death. So the food will have to simmer for the moment on the back burner (but of course, not too long).

Let’s go back to the memorial service. Here we were in this stark, funeral-home chapel as the pews filled with Gregory’s friends and family, mine, and his business associates. It was a service that almost didn’t happen. At one point, Gregory’s cousin and his wife (who had taken over the “arrangements”), the funeral-director chick, and I had gathered around Aurora’s bed in the hospital, where she was recovering from hip surgery.

When I mentioned doing a memorial service, the cousin and his wife seemed surprised. “Who would come?” they asked. I told them a lot of his friends were asking about one. Skeptical, they allowed me to put the service together.

So there we were in the chapel. I sat between my psychic friend, who whispered to me that Gregory was there, and Gregory’s best friend, DeWayne, who had collected tributes. Aurora insisted that her priest, Father Franks, preside. DeWayne and I just wanted to make sure the tributes got read.

At length, it was my turn, and while many of the other remembrances had made me cry, I also felt shimmering inside at the outpouring of love.

I slid down the pew toward the center aisle and climbed up to the pulpit, there to see for the first time how full the chapel was, how many people were there for him and me. I took a deep breath and began: “More than anything, I am thankful that Gregory and I had five wonderful years together, years made sweet with simple pleasures – doing laundry before a morning walk, cooking together, sitting on the couch and reading the paper....” I told about our first date and Gregory wiggling his toes in the grass (at the restaurant, no less). I told about a playful incident at the drugstore scarcely a week before with Helena and a hand cart. I told how Gregory had held me the day of the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, and of looking up to see tears in his eyes, too. I closed with a colleague’s line about Gregory’s purpose in my life being to make me “be a good dresser!”

I returned to my seat, and Father Franks reclaimed the pulpit, commending Gregory’s soul to God. But before the postlude could begin, a handsomely dressed, young African-American man bounded up to the pulpit and said into the microphone, “Wait. Please, wait. I wasn’t able to get my tribute to Gregory in on time, and I’d like to offer it now.”

There was a pause. I thought he was going to take a piece of paper from his breast pocket and read. Instead, a sonorous baritone rose up out of that slender body, expanding to fill the entire chapel with “Amazing Grace.”

One by one, the members of the congregation joined in, following the lead of this huge voice and heart. When he had finished, the room felt so light. We even managed to smile though our tears as the organist played a tortured postlude of “Forever Young” and “Against the Wind,” Gregory’s anthems.

The swell of emotion did not escape Gregory’s cousin and his wife, the ones who had wondered who might attend such a service. They had glimpsed a side of Gregory they’d never known, that he had never shown them.

But then, Gregory was skilled at sealing off different compartments of his life from one another. After he died, the compartments started falling open to reveal the startling contents inside.