I’ve been standing here for 5 or 6 years.  She can’t bear to take me down, but she doesn’t spend any time in this room either.  She’s always called me a scrapbook tree.  Every ornament is a memory of a person, place, or thing.  There is a seahorse to commemorate her first trip back to the beach since 1980.  There is a graduation cap with a tassel to recognize the adventure that completing her degree in her 40s was.

There is a heart with a pink ribbon for the second best friend who died.  Oddly there is not one for the first best friend.  I wonder when that will occur to her.  There is a sunflower for the third and best best friend who died.

Her dad is well represented – a miniature Marine in dress blues as well as a “lid” with the Marine Corps insignia on it.  There is not an ornament for her grandchild.  She has bought them, but they lay in boxes waiting for her energy and desire to return.  She also has a COVID mask at the ready to remember the pandemic and resultant case of long COVID.

Most years, I am adored and celebrated.  She takes photo after photo.  She’s very proud of me. 

But she’s grieving.  Still the best friend, still the father, still her lover.  She is grieving the circumstances surrounding her only grandchild.  She is grieving her lost youth.  She is grieving her mother’s dementia.  She is grieving her physical decimation that COVID wrought in her body.

This will be the fifth year without a big dinner at the dining room table, the fifth year since her son has been home.  Her heart is heavy.

There are so many happy ornaments on the tree:  the baby rattle that was her son’s, the tiny stocking stuffed with concert ticket stubs.  The popcorn garland and the large topper ribbon her mother made for her.  There’s a gold guitar as remembrance for a wild fling with a bad boy who is now just a good friend.

Last year, her mother gave her the Mrs. Claus ceramic ornament that the woman made in first grade and the old man ornament that came from her great-grandmother’s tree by way of Ireland.  There’s a garden trowel to commemorate the garden that grief built the summer her lover lay dying and then dead.

But it’s the ornaments baptized in the tears of sorrow that she concentrates on.  She used to lie on the couch with headphones and listen to the five CDs that were her mourning albums.  They allowed her to wallow and descend into her grief.  To look at it from the inside out.  She knows every inch of it.  She knows every ornament imbued with sorrow and this year she just can’t bear to look.