The Grief Ghosts of December

Writing is alchemy to transform loss and commemorate love

At first I don’t notice them, the Grief Ghosts of December. The high of hosting Thanksgiving carries me unawares into early December busyness.

But my body remembers and, just below my radar, a hollowness builds in my heart and creeps outward to my limbs and upward to my head until I wonder if I am getting sick, or am just tired, or why do I feel depressed … oh, that’s right, it's December.

Every year I am surprised when my Grief Ghosts return, thinner but still taking up so much room in the waiting room of my psyche, despite decades of psychotherapy and swimming in cold water.

Facebook dropkicked me this week when my brother’s fiancee shared an old post of his. “This one is an eight-footer,” Naji, tall, wide, and bald, sporting a reflective safety vest, tells ABC-7 in a news segment on Christmas tree sales at a lot where he was working for the season. He sold Christmas trees for years, at different lots all over San Francisco. Happy people and good tips Sis, he always said. Hearing his voice made me inhale and hold my breath, reluctant to go to or to let go of the pain in his corner of my heart. Naji died December 15, 2022 of an accidental overdose. My mother became his foster mom in the early 1980s when he was 9 and I was 19. We were always close. His death was a shock, but not a surprising end to his lifelong struggle with addiction, grown from a life of early abuse and trauma that no amount of love and stability from us could heal. His own mother, a Canadian-born Native American taken from her family and raised in the genocidal Canadian Indian residential school system, also overdosed one San Francisco December when Naji was a teenager. His father, an African American Vietnam Vet with PTSD, died of alcoholism when Naji was a young man. A river of grief. Naji had the most beautiful penmanship, like an old school third grade teacher. His perfect and elegant cursive outstripped his fractured education. He wrote me so many letters. “Dear Sis ...” they always began and then thanking me for being there for him. For listening. I listened but I also told him when he was full of shit because I loved him. We always called each other “Butthead.” I planned his funeral at Saints Peter & Paul Catholic Church in North Beach, where Salesians Boys & Girls Club was his second home. I can still feel his sweaty bear hugs.

Choices

December 9, 1983, my 18-year-old college sophmore body walked through the doors of the Manhattan Women’s Medical Clinic on East 23rd Street with my boyfriend to get an abortion. My heart was frozen and I was scared. My family were Christmas and Easter Catholics who believed in birth control, or family planning as it was also known, but mine had failed. We considered abortion a sad last resort, medically, socially, and financially necessary at times. Something that should be legal, private, and left to a woman’s own conscience and her doctor. Roe was barely a decade old and abortion clinics were being picketed and bombed across the country. A bomb would go off in this very clinic exactly two years after I leave to spend the weekend recovering at my boyfriend’s apartment. Once the bleeding and cramps subsided, I felt relief. Disaster averted. I picked up my college life where I had left off— partying, finishing finals, and flew home to San Francisco for winter break. What I expected would be a routine follow-up exam a couple weeks later, turned traumatic when an ultrasound revealed I was still pregnant. My body still remembers the shock of what happened next. Alta Journal published my story in its Fall 2022 issue.

Christmas in Bed

“Daddy? Merry Christmas,” I would tiptoe in as a child to see him sleeping in my parents’ room in our house on Castro Street, his black cloth eyepatch napping on the steamer trunk they used as a side table next to their brass bed. “Can I bring you anything?” He would stir and cough and croak out, “How about a hot toddy, beast?” Every Christmas without fail my father got pneumonia. He called it “walking pneumonia” when he worked through it, writing & editing in the bars that were his preferred offices, and “pneumonia” when he took to the bed around December 24th. What I learned as a child was that my father had lost his left eye on Christmas Eve when he was about ten. His father Warren had been driving their family home after a holiday party. His father had been drinking. I don’t know if that was the cause of the accident that shattered the car’s windshield and blinded my dad, but it was a factor was always mentioned. Surgery failed to save dad’s eye and he was homeschooled for a year while he recovered. Two decades later, he gave up the glass eyes that could never match his baby blue swan lake cerulean iris and embraced the black eyepatch and pirate lifestyle until he died in 2016. My father was a tank of a man who could outlast anyone in drinking, talking, writing, and plotting. His annual Christmas pneumonia was the only time I ever remember seeing him rest. His body always remembered.

Dee’s Last Christmas

“This might be my last Christmas,” Dee would sigh each Christmas for about 25 years. My grandmother, the matriarch of my mom’s large Italian-French family, in fact died two days before Christmas in 2008. She had predicted her death for so many years, none of us believed it would really happen, even Father Gary, who blessed her with the Anointing of the Sick instead of Last Rites when he came to see her on what turned out to be her last day on earth. She lay in bed for several days, congestive heart failure not cramping her voice, comfort, or style very much, surrounded by no less than four family members. There were nearly 30 of us crammed in her bedroom with the rose wallpaper when Father Gary came December 22nd. The hot water heater had just died and Joe, the plumber, was in the hallway replacing it as we chanted the Our Father with her. When she turned 40, she told her devout husband that she was done getting up for mass every Sunday and only went to church for Christmas and Easter, but the prayers came right back to her, her voice strong. She died quietly that night in her bed. I, the first of her eight grandchildren, had nicknamed her ‘Dee.’ She had been 50 when I was born and didn’t want to be called grandma, or nonni, so she tried to get me to call me ‘Millie,’ but toddler me came out with Dee. My birthday was just two days before her in January and we bonded where she and my mother had clashed. “It will be nice to see Pop again,” she told me and said she didn't fear death, as I stared into her eyes, little brown almonds so like my green ones, and held her warm dry hand.

Welcoming the Ghosts

Grief is just love with no place to go, so this year, instead of going dark and quiet, I’ve tried to welcome them by writing publicly of my ghosts; celebrating my ghosts. I remind myself that I need to remind myself each December to make room for some calm and warm and cozy time to mourn the loss and to commemorate the love. Maybe I can alchemize their annual return and change my blanket of despair into a visitation that allows me to get to know them a little better and to commemorate the skin of my heart still attached to them.