The Christmas Blessing

by VanLiere, Donna

  When I stood to take Meghan home, Gramma jumped up and hugged her, asking her to come back soon. I walked Meghan to the front door of her house and noticed she looked tired.

  “It’s probably all the food I’ve eaten today,” she said, laughing. “I’ll sleep it off and feel great in the morning. You are coming over tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the next day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the day after that?” She smiled and my heart skipped a beat again. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, leaning in to kiss me.

  Happy Thanksgiving indeed!

  I walked back into my father’s house, and Gramma was asleep in her chair. Dad was still watching football. I noticed that Rachel wasn’t in the room and assumed she was getting ready for bed.

  “Meghan’s nice,” Dad said. I sat down on the sofa, watching the game. I always loved talking to my dad but when it came to talking about girls and dating, I just froze, not knowing what to say anymore. “What’s her family like?”

  “They’re great,” I said. “Really nice people.” Dad looked over at me and knew I was squirming.

  “She’s really pretty,” he said. I nodded. “Did you kiss her good night?”

  “I’m trying to watch the game here, Dad,” I said. He grinned, and I knew he was trying to get at me. He stood and grabbed his coat out of the closet. “Did you need something?” I asked. “I could have gotten it when I was out.”

  “I’ll just be out for a while,” he said, keeping his voice down.

  “I can go get something for you, Dad.”

  “I’m just going out for coffee.” Gramma snapped to attention in her chair. Dad’s shoulders fell, and he rolled his eyes. She still had ears like a bat.

  “Where are you having coffee?” she asked, curious.

  “Over at Lydia’s house,” Dad said, pulling on his gloves before escaping out the door. Gramma threw her arms over her head and kicked her feet in the air, whooping in celebration.

  “And it only took fifteen years!”

  I went to find Rachel to tell her one of Gramma’s ploys had finally worked. I saw her in Gramma’s room, looking through the letters we had written to our mother.

  I had always thought that Mom’s death was gentler on Rachel than it was on the rest of us. She had no clear memories of Mom; all she had was what we told her along with the photo albums, the locket, and letters. I sat beside her on the floor and filed through the notes written with colorful markers, crayons, pencils, or ballpoint pens. Pictures of stick people or animals were often scribbled on the pages to help illustrate the letter.

  I wrote this letter on what would have been Mom’s thirty-fifth birthday:

  Dear Mom,

  It’s your birthday today and I hope they made you the biggest cake in Heaven. We planted impatunce with Gramma. She said they were your favrite flour and that they’d be real real pretty in a few weeks. I hope you can see them.

  I smiled, reading the rest of the poorly spelled letter. I scanned several letters, my memory blurred about many of them.

  I wrote this one the Christmas after she died, when I was nine:

  Dear Mom,

  When I grow up I want to be a doctor so I can help peopel get better. I thought you’d want to know that on Christmas.

  Merry Christmas! I still love you,

  Nathan

  Were it only that simple, I thought.

  “I always wonder what she’d look like now, don’t you?” Rachel asked. I nodded. Each year as I noticed gray hair in my father’s head I wondered if Mom would be graying or if she’d still have the rich, dark color I always remembered. “I always wonder what we would do together now,” Rachel continued. For the rest of our lives we would wonder about so many things.

  I picked up a letter written in pencil when I was ten without the added touches of badly drawn dogs or ducks to jazz it up:

  Dear Mom

  Today Gramma explaned that you know why you died. She said God made sure bad things didn’t happen to you. She said sumday I’ll understud that better. I hope she’s right.

  I love you,

  Nathan

  When Rachel and I were still children I found a verse from the Bible written on a crumpled piece of paper at my father’s bedside. “. . . For I know the plans I have for you . . . plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” I studied the paper, but making no sense of it I took it to my grandmother. She read it and grew quiet.

  “You need to put this back on your father’s nightstand. These are words that are helping him.” I took the paper from her and headed back to my father’s bedroom. I stopped and turned to look at her.

  “But I don’t understand what they mean.” She took my hand and led me into Dad’s room, setting the paper back on the stack of books he kept on the table by his bed. She sat on the bed and stood me in front of her.

  “Your father has obviously put this on top of his things so that he’s reminded that there’s a longer look of our life that we can’t see. All we see is what’s right in front of us.” I looked down at the words again.

  “I don’t get it.” She hugged me to her.

  “I think that if your daddy didn’t have a reason to hope, he’d have a hard time getting out of bed every day.” I looked at her, confused. “He’ll never understand why your mother had to leave us, none of us ever will; but she knows.” I looked up at her. “As soon as she stepped into Heaven she could see the big picture of her life, and I bet when she saw it that her jaw dropped open and then I bet she started doing cartwheels and handstands and whatever else she used to do with you in the yard.” I looked down at the words written in my father’s handwriting on the paper.

  “How does that help Dad?” She sighed and pulled me up on the bed beside her.

  “Because if your daddy didn’t believe it, he’d go absolutely crazy without your mother.” I stared at the paper on the nightstand.

  “My mother was a good person, wasn’t she?”

  “She was the best kind of person that ever was, Nathan.”

  “Then why did she get cancer and die?” Her lips tightened.

  “Because she was human,” she whispered. “There is no other reason.” She ushered me out of my father’s room. “Come on, go show me one of those cartwheel flip-flop things you do.” She ran me outside and watched as I flipped from one side of the yard to the other, taking my mind off my mother’s death for the moment.

  Rachel picked up a letter and laughed, reading the letter written in crayon on a paper bag:

  Dear Mommy

  I don’t like Nathan any mores so culd you send me anuther bruther from Heven? If you cant find one, a dog wuld be beter.

  Love,

  Rachel

  I snatched the aged letter and looked at it.

  “When did you write this?”

  “Last year,” she said, breaking into laughter.

  Now that the holidays were in full swing, staff members took days off here or there, leaving the medical students to help out where necessary, seeing patients who weren’t part of our normal rounds. Some of the medical students were even volunteered to help decorate certain floors of the hospital for Christmas. This was my assignment for the day, and I was grateful to get out of the emergency room for a while. Normally, Christmas would sneak up on me, leaving me in a lurch to find Christmas presents for everyone, but this year I couldn’t wait. I hadn’t been this excited about Christmas since before my mother died.

  I filtered through the boxes of tinsel and bulbs and helped Denise and Claudia spruce up the nurses’ station on the pediatrics floor. I even hung tacky icicle lights from the ceiling so they’d dangle over the entire circumference of the desk.

  “I’m going to leave those up till July,” Denise said.

  “So you’re the neighbor in the apartment next to mine,” I said, jumping off the ladder. I found a small tabletop tree in a box and pulled it onto the desk, straightening each
limb. I was going to leave it at the nurses’ station when a thought struck me. Digging through the boxes, I found a small string of lights and little bulbs that were perfect for the tree. I poked my head into Hope’s room.

  “Knock, knock.” Hope looked up and motioned for me to come in. Her mother was sitting beside her on the bed. “Who’d like a little Christmas cheer in here?”

  “Can I have that to myself?” she asked, looking at the small tree in my hands.

  “You can have it, but you have to do the work.” I put the tree on a cart and rolled it to Hope’s bedside. Her mother helped her sit up and winked at me; Hope reached for the string of lights, sizing them up. I left to find a few other decorations.

  “Playing favorites?” Denise asked. I stopped digging through a box by the nurses’ station and looked up at her.

  “Is this bad?” She pulled out a cheap, dancing Santa and handed it to me.

  “If it is, I’m guilty, too. Take her whatever she’d like.”

  When I returned to Hope’s room later in the day to check on her, I laughed out loud at the sight. There sat the tiny tree, drooping from the weight of ornaments; red ribbon hung from the lamps and tinsel surrounded the bed, window, door, and TV. A small wooden nativity sat on the bed stand next to Hope, and the Santa stood on the tabletop next to the tree, swinging his hips from side to side to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

  “Denise kept coming back with things,” her mother said.

  “Couldn’t she find any tacky plastic lawn ornaments?” I asked.

  “She’s still looking,” Hope said, smiling.

  The Sullivans dragged the large Douglas fir through the back door, and Jim grunted in satisfaction. “Now that’s a man’s tree. Isn’t it, Luke?” Luke pulled off his coat and gloves and threw them on the floor.

  “Yeahhh,” Luke said, grunting like his father.

  “Three whacks, and this baby was on the ground begging for mercy,” Jim said, struggling to stand the tree up.

  “Thirty whacks is more like it,” Allison said. “The poor thing was saying, ‘Please, just get it over with, already.’” Jim laughed although no one could see him through the tree’s branches.

  “When I stand it up, slip the tree stand under it.” Meghan tried to help her father lift the tree, but she had no energy. A bout of early-morning vomiting had left her nauseous and tired throughout the day. She didn’t tell her parents she was sick; her mother tended to blow even the most minor illnesses out of proportion.

  “We’ll be finding pine needles in August,” Allison said, bending over to put the stand in place.

  “Before Christmas, Allison,” Jim yelled through the mass of needles. “These things are killing me!”

  Allison tightened the bolts on the stand, which started a verbal volley of lean it to the left, more to the right, it’s leaning backward now, turn it toward the window, turn it away from the window, back it up, pull it forward, more, more, more, no, move it back again.

  When the tree was all but decorated, Jim hoisted Olivia into the air to place the angel on the top branch, which just missed the ceiling. Olivia stretched her small arms to the upper reaches of the tree. “She’s beautiful,” Olivia said, pulling her shirt back down to cover her belly. Jim turned off all the lights, and the family sat together on the sofa, admiring their work.

  “We should sell tickets for people to come see it,” Meghan said, exhausted from the effort.

  Allison raised her cup of cider. “Here’s to the official beginning of another Sullivan family Christmas. May it be the most beautiful one ever!”

  • • •

  At one in the morning, Meghan woke her mother and father. When Jim turned on the light and saw her face, he swept her up in his arms and ran to the car.

  The ER was quiet. Rory was on duty. He paused when he looked at Meghan; her skin and eyes were yellow in color. “I think I have food poisoning,” Meghan said. “It’s either that or the worst flu I’ve ever had.” Rory took her temperature, and she was running a high fever. His physical exam revealed that her liver was enlarged and felt firm to the touch.

  “We need to do some blood work,” Rory said. Meghan groaned.

  “Dr. Goetz just drew blood a few days ago. Can’t you just read those results?” Rory shook his head.

  “You probably weren’t jaundiced a few days ago.”

  “I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” Rory said, pulling open the curtain. Another doctor was with him. “But I wanted Dr. Lucas, one of our gastroenterologists, to read these results, as well as one of our infectious disease specialists.”

  Allison and Jim were quiet, staring at Rory and Dr. Lucas.

  “I’m Dr. Lucas.” Meghan shook the doctor’s hand. “Your blood tests revealed that your hepatic enzymes are elevated.” Meghan sat still, looking at her. “We’d like to do a needle biopsy of your liver to rule out hepatitis.”

  “When?” Meghan asked.

  “Right away.”

  Dr. Lucas clutched Meghan’s file to her chest and walked into the room where Jim, Allison, and Meghan had been waiting for the last few hours for the biopsy reports from pathology. “The biopsy is showing an undifferentiated hepatitis.”

  “What is that?” Meghan asked. Dr. Lucas paused and took a breath.

  “You have something that is causing your liver to be inflamed. Normally we can identify that as hepatitis A, B, or C; but in your case we can’t identify the cause.” Meghan and her parents sat in silence, trying to grasp what Dr. Lucas was saying.

  “She hasn’t done anything to get hepatitis,” Jim said. Her illness just didn’t make sense.

  “This is a viral hepatitis,” Dr. Lucas said. “Meghan saw Dr. Goetz six months ago for her annual exam and told him she’d been feeling nauseous previous to that but that it eventually went away.” Meghan nodded. “I would speculate that that is when the hepatitis was affecting your liver.”

  “But where did it come from?” Allison asked.

  “We can’t determine what the infectious agent was. It could be a million things. It could have been anything airborne.”

  “What will you do?” Jim asked. Dr. Lucas hated this part of her job. She held tighter to the file and looked at Meghan.

  “Judging by your biopsy, this is progressing at a rapid pace, and we need to get a transplant surgeon involved with your care immediately.” Meghan felt her heart drop but never took her eyes off Dr. Lucas. “I’ve contacted a transplant surgeon to speak with you as soon as possible.” Allison jumped to her feet.

  “Oh God, no,” she wailed. “There must be something else you can do.”

  “This is the only thing we can do,” Dr. Lucas said.

  My rotation started at six; I figured I’d call Meghan later in the morning, once I knew she was up. At ten, I reached for the phone on the nurses’ station in the ER but stopped dialing when a folder in a stack of files caught my eye. Meghan’s name was on it. I scanned it and snapped my head up, looking for Rory. He was in the lounge, getting his things together to go home. He was still answering my questions as I bounded up the stairs.

  • • •

  “Here I am,” Meghan said. “Back at my favorite vacation destination.” I glanced at Jim and Allison, who looked like they’d logged ten years in the last nine hours.

  I snatched her chart at the end of her bed and glanced over it, feeling my heart beat faster as I read the notes Dr. Lucas had written: vital signs stable, patient condition jaundiced and deteriorating. Biopsy report shows fulminant hepatitis. I could hear myself breathing—full-blown hepatitis. Then I read, Consult transplant team. Meghan watched me read through the notes. “It’s not as bad as they say,” she said, trying to smile. It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me and I couldn’t speak. I kept staring at the chart—fulminant hepatitis. Meghan motioned for me to sit on the side of her bed.

  “Dr. Lucas said there’s the possibility of finding a living donor.” I nodded. Since the liver regenerates itself, a porti
on is all that is necessary for a successful transplant. Jim and Allison’s hopes would soon be dashed when they learned that neither of them, nor extended family members, were a close enough match. I immediately went through the tests and would learn later that even Dr. Goetz was tested. None of us came close enough to matching.

  “You doctors are always so serious,” Meghan said, comforting me. She grabbed my hand and held it tight. “You always forget that Christmas is full of miracles.” I looked up at her. “There’s always a miracle at Christmas,” she said.

  A thick, dry knot formed in my throat. I knew otherwise. How many times did I pray for a miracle? How many times did I beg God to heal my mother and make her well? I knew that miracles still happened, but I also knew that sometimes it was as if the heavens were silent.

  EIGHT

  Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

  —Thornton Wilder

  Dr. Goetz pushed a wheelchair to Meghan’s room.

  “For m’lady,” he said.

  “I can walk, Dr. Goetz,” she said. He pointed to the chair.

  “Hospital policy. Sit.”

  “Don’t you have orderlies who do this?” she asked.

  “You want an orderly to take out my best girl,” Dr. Goetz said, teasing her. “I don’t think so!” He pushed her through the halls and into the elevator. Jim pulled the car around, and Dr. Goetz pushed Meghan to the curb, opening the car door for her. He helped her out of the chair and held on to her, afraid she might fall on the melted snow on the pavement.

  “I can walk on my own, Dr. Goetz,” she said.

  “I know you can,” he said. “But I might fall.”

  He smiled and helped her into the car. Then he did something he’d never done with any of his patients: he kissed her forehead. He closed the door, and Meghan waved at him through the window. He felt a catch in his throat and put his head down to avoid eye contact with anyone who might stop him to talk; then he pushed the chair back into the hospital.