As promised, I am posting another one of my Christmas essays tonight, along with a poem. This particular essay is very close to me still, even though it was written several years ago.
Saint Marty is always in search of the the light.
How
the Light Gets In
by: Martin Achatz
“We
are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.”
---Ernest
Hemingway
My daughter was born at the end of
an early December snowstorm. I remember
the wind that night while my wife was in labor, the kind of wind that shakes
parked cars. It tore up the darkness, as
if it was mad at the sun for disappearing to the other side of the planet. At some point during that long, midnight
vigil, I joked to my wife, Beth, “Keep it down.
I can’t hear the wind.”
She didn’t laugh.
At 7:29 the following morning, our
daughter was born, screaming and healthy.
The
storm had blown itself out like a birthday candle by the time Beth gave the
final push that brought our baby into the world. Outside, everything was blinding white and
calm, a scene from Currier & Ives.
Inside, I stood by my wife’s bed and stared at her and my newborn
daughter, felt myself opening up, unfolding like some rare orchid in the
moment. So serene. So perfect.
I’d
like to end with that Madonna and child moment, tell you that later in the
morning, three kings showed up and showered us with presents and food and free
camel rides. But that isn’t quite what
happened.
Before she became pregnant, my wife
had been battling crippling bouts of depression. She’d been to counselors and therapists,
talked about her mother’s death, started taking Prozac. Nothing worked. The depressions kept getting deeper
and longer, as if she were on some endless donkey ride through the Grand Canyon
at night during a full lunar eclipse.
These lows were always followed by periods of respite, chrysalis times
when my wife broke free, became all wing and sun and light.
Then Beth got pregnant. For those nine months, the darkness simply
vanished. At first, we kept watch,
waiting for the nose of an iceberg to appear on the horizon. After a few months of clear seas, however, we
relaxed, began planning our future with something like hope. My wife seemed to be waking up after a long
fallow season. Our life became a series
of doctor’s visits and firsts. First
hearing of our daughter’s heartbeat.
First ultrasound. First time our
daughter moved.
When we painted the nursery walls
that autumn, my wife’s depressions were like shadows in the corners of a
well-lit room. I was in graduate school,
writing poems about mosquitoes and moons.
Beth only had one bout of morning sickness her entire pregnancy. Approaching her due date and the upcoming
holidays, we never heard the chains of the Ghost of Mental Illness Yet to Come
rattling at our front door.
It took only a couple days after
our daughter was born for the honeymoon to end.
Beth woke up one morning and said to me, “I have a nervous feeling in
the pit of my stomach.” These nervous
feelings were omens that something dark was about to descend, and I could see
it in my wife’s eyes. She had the look
of a rabbit being chased by a screech owl, ready to bolt down the nearest
burrow.
Her OB-Gyn seemed concerned but not
panicked. She gave Beth estrogen patches
and told her it was the post-partum blues.
We liked this doctor a lot, and both of us clung to the belief that
these little round stickers of hormone would steer the UPS truck to our house
to deliver a glowing package of joy to our front porch.
As the winter solstice approached,
however, I would come home from work night after night to find Beth still in
bed, our daughter on the pillows beside her.
The bedroom was a cave filled with the smell of sour breast milk. I’d climb into bed with them and hold Beth
while she wept. As a writer, I don’t
often use the word “wept.” It’s too
melodramatic a verb, summoning up Heathcliff and Jane Eyre on the moors. But there’s no other word for how my wife
clung to my shirt and sobbed, her body convulsed with a grief so profound it
made her seem unstitched, as if her bones and muscles and skin couldn’t contain
it. Sadness seeped out of her pores like
thick, black sap.
Pain is a part of most Christmas
narratives. Mary is a pregnant teen,
shunned and rejected. As a boy, Scrooge
is abandoned by his father. George
Bailey is suicidal. Rudolph is
bullied. And then there’s Nestor, a
little donkey with ears as long as elephant trunks. In this Rankin/Bass holiday special, Nestor
is teased for his anatomical anomaly and eventually gets kicked out of the barn
during a blizzard on the winter solstice, a night, according to legend, when
animals are given the gift of speech.
Nestor’s mother follows him and ends up lying on top of him to keep him
warm. She saves Nestor but loses her
life in the process.
Despair accumulates like heavy snow
in all these stories. Yet, there are
also Garcia Marquez moments of magic.
Ghosts. Wingless angels. Blazing comets. The long December nights always end with warm
hay and church bells and sunrises.
The druids and Celts understood
this dual nature of the winter solstice time, this battle between death and
life, darkness and light. I think early
Christians understood it, as well.
That’s why they chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ around
December 21. They saw it as a time when
human beings reached through the black and cold of winter toward the warmth and
rebirth of spring, the very planet tilting from sorrow to hope.
On Christmas Eve, Beth was having a
good spell. For a few days, she’d been
able to get out of bed, play with our daughter, and wrap presents. During the day on December 24, we made sugar
cookies and fudge, watched one of the multiple broadcasts of It’s A Wonderful Life on TV.
Outside, the clouds were the color
of a dirty gum eraser, smudged with the promise of snow. The lilac bushes along our property line were
capped with white. Their branches
rattled in the wind like startled deer hoofs on ice or stone. A storm was coming. The weatherman was forecasting several inches
by Christmas morning.
At church that night, Beth and I
sat with family. Our daughter slept in
the crook of my arm the entire service, her velvet dress the color of
evergreen. As we lit candles and sang
“Silent Night,” my wife slipped her fingers into my open palm and looked at me,
a thin smile on her face. She wasn’t
doing well, I could tell. It wasn’t
anything physical in her appearance. It
was the pressure of her body against mine as we stood, as if she wanted to
climb inside my skin, disappear into me.
We drove home in silence, her hand
holding mine so tight my fingers ached.
I thought of the new ornament hanging in the branches of the tree in our
living room. It was an angel sleeping on
a cloud, and on the cloud were the words “Baby’s First Christmas.” It should have been that simple, that
peaceful.
As we walked to the front steps of
our house, Beth leaned into me. The moon
pressed through the clouds above, shedding a dim silver on the snow banks along
the sidewalk, like a failing flashlight.
Familiar shapes, shovels and garbage cans and bushes, became looming
shadows. My arms ached, as if they were
holding up not just my wife and baby, but the heavens, as well. All of the talk of light and hope and joy
from the church seemed as distant as Orion or Antares.
Then I saw something move in the
night. A small, hunched shape on the
apex of a snow pile. I stopped and
stared at it. For a few moments, it
remained frozen, and I started to believe it was simply a chunk of ice, that my
mind was playing tricks on me. But it
eventually stretched upward, like a crocus blooming in time-lapse, until it
stood half in darkness, half in moonlight.
It
was a rabbit, brown and tall. Its ears
twitched back and forth, testing the night for danger. I could see the Christmas lights from our
front porch reflected in the black marbles of its eyes. Its body was taut, like the band of a
slingshot. It stayed balanced on its
hind feet, regarding me. I suddenly
thought of the legend of the talking animals, of Nestor crying for his mother
in the night. The rabbit looked as if it
was going to speak, to impart some ancient lepus wisdom of how to avoid pain
and sorrow.
I waited on that Christmas Eve,
that night of turning from darkness to light, for some kind of miracle to
happen. I wanted to believe that a
rabbit could tell me how to help my wife, that God could become human, that
happiness could overcome the black of winter.
My daughter cried out in my arms,
and the rabbit bolted. I watched it
scramble out of the moonlight into the pitch of the lilac bushes. Then, silence and snow and dark. We began moving toward our front door. For some reason, the distance seemed
unusually hard, as if we were struggling through water or against a strong
wind. It would be half a year before
Beth was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Those six months were filled with more deep depressions, followed by
flights of sleepless energy. Some days,
Beth would carve hieroglyphs into her arms with razors or knives. Other days, she would book airfare to Florida
and Walt Disney World. I kept waiting
for the long night to end. For a ghost
bear to materialize and groan a healing incantation. Or a flock of angel starlings to gather in
our maple tree and sing a lullaby.
Something soft that would quiet my wife’s unquiet mind.
That Christmas Eve, as we walked to
our home, I thought of the magi, struggling through desert and mountain. I thought of the sand in their teeth and
hair. Their tired camels and mules. Their muscles and bones aching for water and
rest. Their long journey, following a
star, through the darkness toward the promise of light.
Thoughts of Darkness and Light
on the Winter Solstice
by: Martin Achatz
The night,
as long as Cecil B. Demille’s
The Ten Commandments, starts with baby
wail in
bulrushes, stones the size
of
elephants, plagues of blood and darkness.
Ribs of
light crack off, disappear
into the
belly of star and cloud and cold.
No moon,
just endless moments of ash,
smolder,
embers of everything day.
I sit in
the lobby of a hotel in a city
at the
edge of polar night, think of you,
the
eclipse of your life, how light
stays in
the corners where you still find
pieces of
paper with her handwriting,
books
dogeared by her fingers,
presents
purchased, waiting
for the
bright wrap of morning.
Darkness
can be a friend, hold you
when
bright grief batters your heart, sneaks
into those
fissures, cracks,
like light
seeping under a doorframe
into a
lightless room. Darkness holds
the
possibility that you might see her again,
her shadow
fingers in your hair,
rearranging
gray locks, shadow
palms on
your cheeks,
warming
paper skin, shadow
words in
your ears, whispering
about the
resurrection of Christmas,
how you
will find her in an evergreen
bush,
burning with mountain fire.
She will
carve her name in the stone
tablets of
your heart.
