ATTACHMENT
This was my first Christmas at home since Kathe died in May of 2021. Last year, Christmas, 2021, I went to Rehoboth Beach for Christmas with the Mahy clan, the sisters of Todd, Susie’s husband. I had just come back from Germany and the Celle Christmas market and left three weeks later for Rehoboth Beach.
Christmas was the high point of the year for Kathe. She decorated the house and our tree. She planned months in advance what she was going to give people and spent hours wrapping presents and delivering them to people.
It was at Christmas time in Winsen, Germany, in 1961, which I spent with Kathe and her family, that beside the Weihnachtsbaum I invited Kathe to come for a visit to the United States. Travel was long and expensive in those days. I didn’t realize then that in asking her to visit me in the United States I was inviting her to marry me. She was instantly ready for the adventure and, hardly knowing me (we had only been in each other’s presence about seven days), she made the trip to the American consulate in Hamburg where she applied for a green card which allowed her to spend the rest of her life, able to work, in the United States as a German citizen.
Christmas in the Schrader family was magical. The afternoon of Christmas Eve, when Christmas is celebrated in Germany, the family was shooed out of the house while Kathe’S mother decorated the tree. Volker, Kathe’s brother and Kathe and I went for a long walk through the woods to an inn in the forest which served trout, kept in a stream next to the inn. I think we drank warm Gluhwein, spiced wine, and then walked back as it was getting dark.
We were not allowed in the living room. We waited in the dining room, and then the door opened and there was the tree shimmering in the dark. There were no electric lights or glass ornaments, instead the tree was festooned with lighted candles on every branch with straw stars and apples hanging on red ribbons. Each person was given one present, usually a book. We sang Heilige Nacht and the family told stories in German.
And that is how Christmas was for the next 60 years. In America with its wood houses, afraid of fire, we only had lighted candles for a few years. But we made stars of German straw that Kathe brought with her and hung apples and then began to add German ornaments which Kathe gathered on her rare trips home. For years family Christmas was in our house. We even celebrated December 6 when Santa Claus would come to visit. The house was decorated, the chidren’s eyes were huge. They didn’t notice that I was suddenly not there and then Kathe would glance out the window and notice with surprise a shoe filled with goodies, lowered from heaven on a red ribbon at the edge of our front porch. And then, a little later, I would reappear and they would tell me the story of their shoe filled with chocolate red and gold Santa Clauses dropping from the sky.
As the children grew our Christmas’s expanded. We sometimes included a visit to a neighbors house and for a while went to church Christmas Eve. And we soon had more and more presents, not the single book, as in Germany. But always Kathe was at the center, the creator of magic who lit up with delight and lit us up with delight every year.
So today was my first Christmas without Kathe after sixty years of celebration. And without at first realizing it and certainly not willing it as Christmas Eve day went by I thought more and more of Kathe while Susie, staying with me because her house in the hollow was locked in ice was out doing errands. Slowly, slowly I became sadder and sadder. Finally, we went to Tom’s house and opened presents and ate a simple festive meal as we have been doing for the past twenty years or so, but the sadness remained.
I had a very strange sensation. Every other year the 15 Melrose living room with its high ceiling and huge decorated tree seemed to me to be jammed with people sitting around the room shoulder to shoulder. But this year there were only seven of us and the room seemed half empty and quiet. And then I realized that prepandemic when we jammed the room there was only one more of us, Kathe. It was Kathe, for me, her happy enthusiasm that filled the room.
We had a good time. Many of the presents for Hannah and Caroline, Kathe’s grandchildren, were things that Kathe had worn or knitted, things that she would have wanted them to have. Kathe was still with us and her presence filled the room, but instead of delighting me it saddened me.
Susie was suddenly sick with some stomach virus and we went home early. But all of Sunday, Christmas Day, the sadness remained. My living room was cozy with a fire burning but completely undecorated. I simply wasn’t able to replace Kathe, to decorate in advance.
All day I thought about Kathe and her Christmas presence and how, except for in photographs, of which I have hundreds, I would never see her again or celebrate Christmas with her again. I knew Kathe wouldn’t want me to be gloomy on Christmas. I certainly wasn’t the first person to miss a loved one who had recently died. But trying to talk myself out of sadness didn’t work at all.
I tried thinking of a Buddhist way out. Attachment leads to pain when you lose the thing you are attached to and fear of losing what you are attached to leads to closing yourself up and putting a hard shell around yourself to protect yourself. But there is no way to protect yourself from losing a person you love. But avoiding attachment in order to avoid pain, living in a non attached way would mean giving up love for Kathe which is what was so good for me. Giving up what makes you feel most alive in order to be non attached and to feel no pain seems stupid. It is precisely because love is good and so intense that you feel pain when you lose the loved on.
So if I am not going to give up love which causes such pain when I lose it, how can I function in a way that makes me feel fully alive, which is what Kathe made me feel?
And then on accepting love fully a strange thing happened. Instead of pain I felt an overwhelming feeling of gratefulness, gratefulness for 60 years of Christmas, gratefulness for Kathe’s German family who have meant so much to me, gratefulness for Germany itself and everything German that has enlivened me and most of all gratefulness for 60 years of delight and joy and companionship within a family of which Kathe was the center. And the sadness which had welled up within me vanished.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 