I was chatting with the petite, thirty something woman as she rifled through a tall box of Christmas ornaments, plopped unceremoniously in my mother’s back yard. “This is cute,” she said, holding up a gold plated wreath decorated with a partridge, a couple of turtle doves and three French hens.
“My mother loves The Twelve Days of Christmas,” I said, feeling the need to explain. She smiled politely and continued her nosedive into the old moldy box.
My mother loved Christmas. For years she and my Dad hosted a Christmas party for 40 or so of their closest friends and family. It was a much sought after invitation, a perennial red circle date on the December calendar. There was Christmas punch and rum soaked fruitcake and piping hot beef stroganoff with long grain rice.
And there was the requisite singing of carols that signaled that dinner was near. My father wore a Santa Hat and a silver whistle and conducted the ceremonial singing with a thin strand of spaghetti. He was a master at getting people to cooperate, even if they didn’t really want to, and the threat of not being fed was a powerful motivator. The highlight of the evening was the singing of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Tiny slips of paper divided the revelers into groups, the Three French Hens and the Four Calling Birds and the Eight Maids a Milking found their partners and gathered together and the singers had to perform their parts to perfection, lest the conductor signal the need to start again. From the beginning.
The drawing of the parts was always random, except, that is, for the partridges. Slips of paper went into the Christmas dish and the parts were drawn one by one, the whispers beginning as the small slips of paper were opened revealing the assigned role. The partridges, on the other hand, were selected ahead of time. Those slips of paper were handed secretively to the select few, the chosen few, those who were deemed worthy. The role of the partridge was always the same. Every year it went to my father and his college fraternity brothers, and it never varied.
There were times that I can remember, when someone tried to upset the well-oiled plan that my mother had orchestrated, but it never worked. Despite some good-natured teasing and a few well-timed and less than noble efforts at bribery, tradition always held. Dad, and his brothers from Pi Kappa Phi, always sang the partridge part.
A little over a month ago we made the decision to put Mom in an assisted living facility. No longer able to recognize the things that were once familiar, the decision was made only slightly easier by the fact that she no longer knew where her home really was. There was an awkward silence in the car as we drove her to this new place and, as we walked her into the foyer and handed her over to a complete stranger, we tried hard to push aside the feelings of failure that washed over us, a son and daughter who had finally come to the realization that someone else could do a better job caring for her than we.
Here we were, dropping her off, like Paddington Bear who was found perched on his suitcase in the London train station, a small tag of instructions tied lovingly 'round his neck. “Please look after this bear. “ I thought, as we handed her over, the knot of anxiety tightly planted in my stomach. “Please look after this bear.”
On Friday night we sifted and sorted through the life that was ours. The souvenirs of trips to Europe. The 1st grade class photos and baby books and years of birthday cards. My father’s elephant collection and the countless Waterford Crystal vases that held my mother’s prized zinnias and snapdragons and pale purple lilacs. It was all there. Mom would no longer return to this place she once called home. It was time to move on. Time to let go of many of the things that had marked her life, their life, and ours together.
One by one, they walked out the door, those pieces of history, of a childhood, carried out by a stranger who did not know that they walked out with a little piece of each of us. Our childhood. A life that we had lived together, once upon a time.
The leather carafe from Florence. The glass dish from Murano. The silver butter dish that I polished each year for the annual Christmas party.
“Please look after this bear,” I whispered silently as one by one, they walked out the door. “Please look after this bear. Thank you.”