An Atheist Confronts Christmas

Mostly I ignore it. Or laugh at it, which isn’t hard to do. For years I sang all the gringo Christmas carols with the worst possible Puerto Rican accent. “Jingle bells” became “jinger bears;” the “one-horse open sleigh” became the “one-whore open sleigh.”

A few things helped. I didn’t have kids, so I was spared having to do the whole thing—the shopping, the putting up the tree, the pretense about Santa. And in Puerto Rico, Christmas is an entirely different affair.

“Why are all the Christmas carols so sad,” asked a student. I knew what he meant, and tried to explain. “Imagine a time of year so dark, so cold. You’re outside, trudging home, the wind is slapping snow in your face. At last you can see the house. It’s totally dark, but you can smell the wood smoke from the chimney. Your legs are tired from the effort of pulling through the snow. Finally, finally you can see—there’s a single candle burning in the window. You’re home.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“It’s all about a light, a single light, that you see in the darkest time of the year. And there’s no reason for that light—in fact, it’s miraculous. You stare at it, this one tiny flame that at any moment can sputter out. It’s infinitely small. Yet it may become larger, grow, warm you and your family and your neighbors. You can cook. You can see. It’s this small, miraculous, filled-with-potential flame that has no reason, no reason whatsoever, to be in your life. You stare and stare, full of wonder.”

“Silent night, Holy night,” he sang. Or rather, parodied. You could have gone out for a cigarette, come back, and still not have gotten to the third line….

“Look, it’s just something in the culture.”

“But it’s a birth, it should be happy, joyous….”

I never convinced him, of course. He left thinking that we celebrated the birth of his Savior with increased and renewed fits of melancholy.

“Christmas is just the time of year when happy people make the rest of us feel more miserable,” said a depressed patient to me, years ago.

I knew what she meant. We were hanging out by the TV, trying not to watch anything about Christmas. We were ignoring it as hard as the rest of the world was shrieking it at us. Oh, except for that afternoon, when family and friends weren’t visiting.

Who wants to go to a nut house on Christmas day?

So occupational therapy had thrown the “Christmas dinner” two days before. We were on marginal staffing. Anybody who had less than a fifty-fifty chance of harming himself or anyone else was discharged.

I worked a lot of those Christmases, operating under the theory that I wasn’t going to celebrate it any way—why shouldn’t I let someone for whom it meant something have the day off? Let some woman be with her kids.

That seemed reasonable up until a couple days ago. When I looked at a guy whom I had first seen as a kid holding his own kid.

And realized for the first time—I didn’t have that.

And I wish I had.

It’s about how you define it. Kids didn’t come into the equation—they were rigorously excluded. So of course I was working those Christmases. Why sit at home and listen to the sounds of joy and delight—presents under the tree!—that weren’t there? Better to go hang with the depressives in the madhouse.

In just the way that generations of Blacks accepted Jim Crow for years, we accepted that we’d never have kids. We squared our shoulders, lifted our chins, got on with our lives. Some of us got kids into our lives as teachers or pediatricians or uncles and aunts. Some of us pretended we didn’t want parenthood. We had better—or at least more expensive—vacations.

That same exclusion worked for God. For most of two millennia, the Christian churches had some news for us gay people, and most of the time it wasn’t stuff you wanted to hear. So now, in the last 20 years, I can find a church that accepts me, embraces me.

So?

Well, yesterday was Christmas Eve, the big holiday here. All of the family was gathering. I got sick.

Was it psychosomatic? Can you really bring on severe diarrhea just by wishing to be anywhere else?

My doctor might say yes. My stomach says no.

Whatever. It was going to be very loud in a very small place. People were going to sing, play the typical percussion instruments, dance, tell jokes. It would be five or six hours of forced gaiety.

I am, by a definition that got redefined, childless and godless. I cannot see that little flame, that flicker that may die, or may grow and warm and transform and reform us.

I’m outside, looking in. But I leave the following, for those inside.

The Second Coming, Aborted

It was new and it was old, the trip to the hospital.

I went to see a lady I didn’t know. And what a charmer she was! She managed, despite her difficulty breathing, to entertain a stranger seemingly as effortlessly as if we were meeting in her home.

Almost….

Look, a hospital robs you of many things—usually starting with your dignity.

Which may be why I called her by the honorific “Mrs.” Everybody else, I’m sure, was calling her by her first name. But we chatted, she and I, and though she had no idea who I was, she carried on gamely.

Brought back memories. I spent a decade as a nurse, in a hospital that was virtually identical to the one I visited yesterday.

What struck me the most?

Oddly, the handrails on the walls. But there were familiar sights everywhere—the glassed-in nurses’ station, the waddling nursing assistants, the covered dinner trays.

I remembered the feeling of being in a hospital, and of being a nurse. Oddly, I have no particular memories of those days?

Why?

It may be the curious effect of depression on memory. Some people hypothesize that depression and especially anxiety hinder the ability to retain memory. I can recall bits of that past, but not much. I know that a lot happened, much of which should have been, and was, memorable. But it’s not there.

Wait—a patient. Manic as hell, and completely out of control. Admitted pregnant, by another patient, who was even worse. It was a nightmare—virtually no drugs could be given to her, because she was pregnant. And so she shredded the unit into chaos, and there was nothing anyone could do.

The doctors, of course, came and went. But it was eight hours of sheer hell for the nurses. The patients got the worst of it—24 hours. Well, no, 22 hours—the patient was sleeping only 2 hours a night, and that intermittently.

So the nurses were howling. One—what were we going to do about that unborn child? Sorry, but it was the clearest possible choice for an abortion. The gene pool was a disaster. And the parenting skills / home environment were even worse.

The problem, of course, was consent. We were documenting that the patient was running naked down the halls screaming that Jesus was humping her. Could we then turn around and attest that she had knowingly consented to an abortion?

It went on for weeks. There was pre-hell—the hours before your shift when you counted the minutes before you had to go in there. There was the hell itself. And post-hell, which generally meant several strong drinks and bed.

News alert to doctors—fetuses grow.

So there she was in her second trimester. Still untreated, still crazy. We knew, those of us aware of the past, what Bedlam must have been. Except that instead of one untreated crazy, Bedlam had a ward-full.

Somebody screamed loud enough, or perhaps long enough. Social services looked for some family member who could give consent.

Nobody—the patient had exhausted her family.

Eventually, the hospital went to court. Which meant, of course, a delay of some weeks.

The hearing was postponed….

The patient was now of the belief that she was carrying Jesus’ child, which would be the Second Coming. This excited ribald commentary in the staff; I wept.

And I was the nurse to prep her for the abortion that eventually the judge ordered. Oh, and to give her the medicines that would finally, finally sedate her.

“When Thorazine first came out, it was in a container about the size of a gallon of water. Had a little pump on it, and you were supposed to put precisely 100 or 150mg of the stuff in a glass of orange juice. Well, I did for a while. Then, I just started to take a look at the patient. If he was really crazy, I’d just pump away like hell!”

The words of an older nurse. And one I respected. So of course I topped up the pregnant patient’s drink, as it were, and put her on the gurney. We went down to surgery together. I signed off, another nurse took over.

You’ll have guessed what happened.

The abortion was performed, and the child was…

…born alive.

Which meant, of course, that a code had to be called, and every effort made to save the life of this poor child.

I left nursing soon after that.

Oh—and is that the reason I remember so little?