Until my grandfather died when I was 13, my grandmother's house at Christmas time was stuffed more fully than a Christmas dinner turkey with hundreds of tacky, horrific, and amazing ornaments, tinsel, singing lights, Victorian villages, glowing reindeer, and porcelain dolls in festive outfits that my grandmother had collected over the years.
I didn't really meet my grandparents until I was eleven years old. Being a military brat doesn't leave much time for travelling to visit family for the holidays, and I don't remember the few times I saw them as a younger child. I do remember when my dad was finally posted to Alberta, only a few hours away from my grandparent's home near Edmonton.
I remember the first time walking into their house at Christmas time, how overwhelmed and excited I was to see a house practically vomiting up Christmas cheer. My immediate family never bothered to decorate our house, inside or out, aside from the standard Christmas tree, bowing beneath the weight of macaroni ornaments and tinsel.
But here was a Christmas wonderland, festooned with candy canes and flashy, obnoxious trains. In the middle of it all, my grandfather who cooked a Christmas meal each year for more people than I could imagine being related to, and my grandmother, who took out boxes and boxes of Christmas cheer every single year and opened her tiny home for dozens upon dozens of cousins.
My grandfather died of cancer on Dec. 19, when I was 13 years old. It was the day I was set to perform in two starring roles in my school's Christmas concert. I remember standing up and delivering all my lines, just as Ihad rehearsed, and then, at the end of the show, standing up with the rest of my school and singing the final song. There were candles involved, and I looked out into the audience and realized my father was there, sitting alone, because my mother hadn't come.
I think that's when it actually sunk in that my grandfather had died. I'd never known anyone who had died before.
I can remember coming to my grandmother's house the next day, and the ornaments were out, and the ribbons and garlands were hung, but none of the lights were on.
My grandfather died at home, with my grandmother beside him, and she spent Christmas Eve alone on the couch. Christmas morning, she woke up and didn't remember he was gone. I was watching and I saw the moment she realized it, that it was Christmas morning and he wasn't there and none of the lights were on. I felt like maybe she'd understand how it felt, standing among a bunch of school children singing about the joys of the season when all you could do was cry and hold onto your candle.
My grandmother said the day my grandfather died, just before it happened, she told him that it was OK, that he could let go, and she'd follow him soon enough, after she was done taking care of the children.
When I was nineteen years old, my grandmother died of cancer, very similarly to the way my grandfather went. I was living in Halifax at the time, and I flew back to Edmonton to see her. It was late November, and she was in the same room, in the same bed, that my grandfather had been in five years before, dying just as he had been. There were no Christmas decorations. There hadn't been any at all since my grandfather died, or any massive feasts or dozens of cousins sitting at tables pushed together that spanned the length of my grandparents' home. It was dark and quiet, and the last time I saw my grandmother, she took my hand, told me she loved me, and asked me to live a better life than she did. I don't think I can. She died on Dec. 22. I don't know if anyone hung her Christmas lights up for her before she did. My grandparents loved each other very much. Their love story is too long and too important to be told in as many words as I have here to tell it. But each year, at Christmas time, I miss them a little bit more.
