Angel Socks

 

As we countdown to Christmas 2020, what some might call "the worst Christmas ever," here is a story about what some might call my "worst Christmas ever" -- yet it wasn't. Christmas is just another day…

Three years after my father’s diagnosis with what we now call Early Onset Dementia (he was 60 years old) and a year after the birth of his first two grandchildren, my mother and I made the difficult decision to place my father in a long-term care facility. It took us a couple of attempts, but finally, in early December, he was admitted to the locked unit for those living with dementia.

My mother deserved to spend Christmas with the grandkids in the United States, so I booked her a flight, and waved her off a week after her husband was settled in, and a week before Christmas.

Despite all suggestions, some rather pointed, that it would be better, I didn’t stay away from the nursing home in order to let my father “get used to it”. The last thing we wanted was for him to believe he’d been abandoned so I spent every morning and every afternoon sitting or walking with him around the unit and in the main hallways.

On December 21^st, a Sunday, I went back to the nursing home after supper because the Rita MacNeil Christmas Special was on the television that night and she was my father’s favourite female singer (we’d attended her Christmas concert in Peterborough two years earlier). As the show began at eight o’clock, I sat next to him on one of the vinyl couches in the lounge but we were not alone. All twenty-two of the residents of the locked unit had joined us to watch this Christmas special. The nurses began to dispense bedtime meds and snacks. I looked around at all these now-familiar faces and realized, These are my people and this is my life now: spending a relaxing evening in the secure ward watching TV. I’m not sure if I stood out more for my youth or for the fact I wasn’t wearing pajamas.

It had been eight days since Dad was admitted to this small, 22-bed unit on the main floor and despite my presence, it was obvious missed his wife. Every day he woke up in an unfamiliar room that he shared with a stranger and spent his day surrounded by twenty-two people he didn’t know and couldn’t ever get to know, having his most personal needs taken care of by women who were not his wife. In the course of three shifts, my father could have been looked after by six different women.

I had taped the official George-and-Ellen Christmas card from to Dad’s closet door and one of the regular day PSWs told me she points to their framed pictures on the window ledge and tells him those are his grandchildren.          

I was fine until someone would say it’s going to be a rough Christmas then I’d remember why it should be. Only, it wasn’t going to be rough, at least not for me. Acceptance is a wonderful thing. It allows Christmas to be what it is. The year before, it meant open-heart surgery on my parents’ infant grandchild, George, and a vigil until he recovered. This year, it meant dinner at noon in the Alzheimer unit at a nursing home. Christmas meant visiting Dad in the afternoon and spending the evening with the Warings, long-time family friends who were the only people to invite me for Christmas dinner when I was on my own.

When I arrived at their home, with the families of their four grown boys scattered through the house and dinner not ready yet, Mrs. Waring handed me a glass of wine and invited me to sit down on the couch in the quiet living room. A very bulky hand-knit sock lay against the arm of the couch.

“That’s for you,” she said.

She had filled a stocking for me. I can no longer remember everything that was in it but I think there was foot cream and emery boards, chocolates, and the match to the sock that was stuffed, socks she’d knitted herself.

I call them my “angel socks” even though they aren’t what you’d expect from an angel. They aren’t white with gold thread, they don’t glow, they aren’t winged, they certainly don’t have magic powers.

Or do they? 

Because these socks immediately conjure up this memory of her kindness. I will never, ever forget what Mrs. Waring did for me that Christmas of 2005, for what was not necessarily a difficult time – but a different time.

Few people have the kind of Christmas that is advertised on television, showcased in made-for-TV movies and presented to us in magazines. Illness, disability, and death don’t pause because there is a tree to be trimmed and presents to be opened and a turkey to be cooked. For some of us, Christmas is a time to be passed through as quickly as possible because of sadness, loneliness and stress.

On a Christmas Day when I woke up alone in our house with my traditional stocking still packed away in a box, on a Christmas Day when I sat with my father in a locked unit and realized no one else had a family member visit them, on a Christmas Day when my father didn’t know how to unwrap his few gifts, Mrs. Waring gave me my best ever Christmas gift: the most meaningful Christmas ever, and the lasting memory of what Christmas is really about.