The Tiny Tree

Last year's holiday season found my mother away from home in a rehab/nursing facility. I had often thought that the holidays must be the very hardest time for the elderly, sick, and/or afflicted to be in nursing care. I saw and experienced just that with and through my mom last year. My mother lived for the holidays and special occasions. She adored any happening that brought her family together, any event that brought her children and grandchildren home. Only last Christmas she was not home. She wasn't delaying the start of family gatherings with her notorious tendency for tardiness. She wasn't fretting that the table wasn't precisely as she wanted it or that the youngest grandchildren were too intent on opening presents to enjoy their holiday dinner.

Friends and family were oh so generous with gifts of food, flowers, plants, cards, and other attempts to cheer her. But my mother just wanted to be home. We told her repeatedly last Christmas that the coming year and the next Christmas would be different. We never imagined how different they would be. We certainly didn't intend 'different' to be in this way.

One of my dearest cousins, truly one of the most thoughtful people I have ever known, bought and decorated a small artificial tree for my mother's hospital room. With its ample plaid bow and gold ribbon, festive white lights, and glittery red ornaments, the little tree brought light and hope and a tiny spot of brightness to an otherwise dark room and dark time in my mom's life. I went into her room several times when the light from the tiny tree was literally the only visible light. I asked my mother on several visits if I could have the tiny tree when she left the hospital. She told me repeatedly that it was hers, and I couldn't have it. She loved that little tree. She didn't want to part with it. But, in a few short weeks, days following the holiday the tree was dressed to mark, my mom was gone. In a cruel and ironic twist, it was the little tree that remained.

After my mother's passing, my father instructed the nursing staff to distribute the plants, decorations, etc. from my mother's room as they saw fit. And the little tree temporarily disappeared. But my dear cousin remembered my infatuation with the tiny pine. She remembered that I, like my mom, had loved it. So, on a mission and after multiple phone calls and visits to track down the tree, my cousin found and delivered it back to me.

In the somewhat surreal year that has followed, the tiny and still trimmed tree has occupied a particularly poignant corner in my living room.....and in my heart. Many times, I have gone in, turned on the tiny lights..... and sat.... and thought...... and wondered. I have never in these many months been able to put the tree away. I suppose I am clinging to a last memory.

I am sure visitors to my home must have thought I was lazy or inattentive or both. Those who knew the story of the tiny tree may have recognized a daughter's last tribute. I am sure others wondered why a simply but beautifully decorated Christmas tree stood in my home through winter, through spring and fall, and now winter again.... through a school year, summer vacation, birthdays of grandchildren, passing days, passing months, a passing year.

How is it that the little tree both haunts and soothes me? I frequently despair that if only we had known what was so soon to be, we would have somehow gotten my mom out of the hospital, if only for Christmas Day. My dad mentioned it. It was I who thought it would be unbearably cruel to move her, only to have to take her back. But I mourn that my mother's last Christmas was in a hospital bed she had grown to dread in a chenille robe that had become her wardrobe staple.

I've recently heard a country song. I don't know who sings it. I don't even know the title. It may not be a current hit. But the lyrics have stopped me in my tracks more than once ..... "There are holes in the floor of heaven, and her tears are pouring down. That's how I know she's watching, wishing she could be here now."

There is more than a bit of impending dread among my sisters and me, three daughters without their mom, as this Christmas fast approaches. And I yet and still may not store the tree, my mother's tiny tree. For I am not quite ready to store the memories.

From a niece she adored, it was a tiny tree she loved, a point of light in a room she hated in a place she desperately wanted to leave, that so specifically defined my mother's last Christmas. And it is a tiny tree now standing in my living room that may one year later define mine.