The Only Truth is Love and Healing

A little hope for the holidays through song

A Very Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and Happy New Year from Ashland.

Ben and I were driving home from Thanksgiving dinner when I heard the first notes of a Christmas song this year. I’d barely digested my turkey when a wave of sentimentality, great expectations and melancholy set in. This is the way of the holiday. 

I used to think the holidays happened to us. If you are lucky, you might have a happy holiday. If you are unlucky, your lot is to trudge through to January. And February. And March.

Over the years, I’ve experienced holidays with the right amount and mix of gifts under the tree where tension was an unwanted guest throughout the night. Other years had far fewer gifts, yet we were full of laughter at bad jokes and gratitude for each other. My memories of the piles of years are like a funhouse mirror of emotions. I’m no longer sure where one begins and one ends through the distortion of time, but a consistent note is a sense of loss each year. 

Through the years

We'll always be together

If the Fates allow

I listen closely to the songs of the season, trying to make sense of the sadness that has come on since I was a young girl. “Chestnuts roasting over an open fire,” reminds me of my beloved maternal grandfather, Lalo, who died suddenly when I was 7. My grandmother, Lala, died days before Christmas after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. My father’s father, Abuelo Bebe, died in Buenos Aires from cancer a month before Christmas. I have never been to his grave. Even before that, I was always aware of a sense of loss, my family listing names of family in Argentina I found hard to place each year around the holiday, wanting to regain lost time or hold what we left behind.

I had already started writing this essay when my mother reminded me that our family came to the United States on the Winter Solstice, just days before Christmas. Our reasons for leaving—fleeing a coup, seeking opportunity, perhaps some adventure—are concepts I’ve spent my lifetime unpacking and likely will never fully understand. And although I have long-meditated on what it meant for my parents to come to the US with three children under the age of 2, I don’t think I ever really considered what it must have been like for the family we left behind. My grandparents on both sides were around my current age, middle-aged, old enough to know what it meant to lose their children and grandchildren, while also wanting them to have opportunities greater than their own. 

On this darkest night, my heart is heavy. Maybe it’s all of the videos of young people singing to grandmothers and vision impaired in Buenos Aires after Argentina won the World Cup (Viva Argentina!). Maybe it was the profoundly sad experience of saying goodbye to my cousin, her partner and her 18-month-old son who I only just met, earlier this month as they left New York to return home to Buenos Aires. Maybe it’s the knowledge that another holiday will come and go with my family living a parallel life from mine on another continent. But as my sponsor reminds me, “the only truth is love and healing.” I am healing.

The experience of an immigrant is one of persistent grief, saying goodbye over and over again and living life in one home with phantom limbs reaching for another home. 

And yet, side-by-side with that sadness and mourning, I also feel a deep sense of gratitude. As I sit here in our second home upstate looking at the snow covered trees and our sleeping dog on this first day of winter, I hope my ancestors know it was worth it. 

As the holiday songs keep playing on the radio, the declarative statements stand out the most: 

Make merry

Let your heart be light 

Repeat the sounding joy

Each one a reminder that we can make our own reality, even when life deals a difficult hand. How am I going to respond to this life? 

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

Fall on your knees

O hear the angels' voices

O night divine

Recovering Catholic and thriving poet that I am, the story speaks to the hope and grace I have experienced in my life. 

My favorite lyrics from Lennon and Ono’s “Happy Xmas” often urges me forward.  

War is over, if you want it.

We choose.

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My mother and I booked a trip to Buenos Aires last night. Although I’ve repeatedly visited the country over my lifetime, it will only be her second visit back since we left and I cannot wait to see it through her eyes. We’ve been toying with the trip for months, having rescheduled it since 2019—my mother’s (fully recovered) cancer, my brother’s death, and a pandemic all standing in our way over the past four years. Sometimes it felt like this trip would never happen. I worried we would never have the chance again. 

If the fates allow, we’ll be flying out on March 21, unwittingly timed with the spring equinox. Life is filled with these cycles, birth, death, rebirth, hope, if you want it.