Will this be your first holiday season without a loved one? It will be rough, but there are some things you can do to ease the pain of missing them. Wochit
EJ Montini: 'A Christmas Carol' is fiction. It's also real. I heard from a ghost just last week.
In Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” the aged miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts.
It’s a fable, a fiction, a figment of the author’s imagination.
It’s also real. During the Christmas season a lot of us are visited by ghosts. I was, just last week.
Her reminder makes me ashamed
I heard from a woman. A mother. I didn’t do what I normally do if a voice on the other end of the phone line is saying things I might quote in a column. I didn’t switch on the voice recorder. I even stopped taking notes. Instead, I did something that seemed more important.
I listened.
Then I opened the drawer to the file cabinet at my desk and moved a few things around until I found the item the woman who called was talking about.
I’ve kept it in the same drawer for years, taking it out to put in on display each Christmas when the woman calls to remind me.
Needing to be reminded makes me ashamed. That shouldn’t be the case. But it is, and I fear that next year, or the year after that, or the year after that, I’ll forget. And no one will set me straight. And that would be a terrible thing.
So this year when the woman called I tried my best to listen. Then I wrote down some of what she said. At least how I remember it.
Christmas became Christmas again
She told me:
This is the last time I’ll bug you.
It’s about the Christmas stocking.
You’ve written about it a couple of times. Thank you.
You don’t have to do that anymore.
Christmas isn’t the same, of course. It will never be the same. But it’s back to being Christmas again, if that makes any sense.
I never had anyone tell me I should “move on” or “get over it.” But I can see that some people think that. It’s been over 10 years now since my son was killed. There is a whole generation of kids who probably have no idea what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were all about.
Neither do I.
Mothers and fathers are still losing sons in those parts of the world but not like before. Newspapers don’t print lists of casualties anymore. My son is now back in time with the sons who were lost in Vietnam, and Korea, and World War II and the rest.
So I won’t bother you anymore.
It was nice of you to write about the Christmas stocking, but you don’t have to keep doing that. You can do whatever you want with it, now. And, Merry Christmas.
What it's like to accumulate ghosts
I received the Christmas stocking she’s talking about several years ago, during the summer.
An envelope arrived at my office that had inside it what looks like a traditional holiday stocking, but made of brown and tan military-style camouflage material. It has "U.S. Marines" stitched onto it in red. There is a pocket on the stocking. There was a note inside the pocket. It read:
"We were going to give this to our son when he returned from his most recent tour. But he died over there. You mentioned him in a column a while back with the names of others who were lost. Thanks for that. Don't forget them." It was signed, "A Marine's mom."
I tell people sometimes that newspaper writers accumulate ghosts.
They assume it’s just a figure of speech.
It’s not. In the beginning, you are like a solitary skater on a pond. Then a story comes along about some lost soul and it is as if the spirit comes up from behind and grabs your hips, gliding along with you. Then another one latches on. Then another. As time passes and the line grows longer, you feel it turning when you turn, tugging and pushing, expanding and contracting. You wonder sometimes if it leaves a wake. A whooshing sound maybe. Or a trail of smoke.
Sometimes, the ghosts come with artifacts. It could be anything. I’ve had police tape. Bits of glass. Letters. Photographs. All kinds of stuff.
And a Christmas stocking.
I’ll keep it.
Of course I’ll keep it.
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