Louise O'Neill: 'Despite everything, we will be okay. We will get through this'
Picture: Miki Barlok
Last year, I wrote my column about our first Christmas since my grandmother had died. “It seems inconceivable that she won’t be there,” I wrote, “for she has always just been there.”
I went on to say that, “so much of Christmas is predicated on the idea of consistency – tradition, ritual, deeply engrained habits. It is a time of year where resisting change is not just expected, it is actually celebrated and because of that, it’s difficult to deal with grief, loss, the greatest transformation of all. The empty seat at the table becomes even more apparent when everything else – the decorations, the music, the food – remains the same.”
It’s peculiar, reading those words now. How eerily appropriate they seem for Christmas 2020, which looks set to be one of the strangest of our lifetimes. Government advice to avoid hugging family members when they arrive for dinner, to use disposable crockery, to wear masks when cooking, and to keep windows open for good ventilation is both reasonable and the stuff of science fiction.
If we could travel back in time to December 2019 and show our old selves – oh, how naïve we are!– a snapshot of the Christmas to come, we would never have believed it.
Until I was four, we lived in my grandparents’ holiday home, a small cottage overlooking Inchydoney beach. After the Christmas Day swim, my father would invite his friends back, handing out cans of beer to warm their blood. This tradition held fast when we moved to the house my parents’ still live in – every Christmas morning, the kitchen is full with cousins and neighbours and friends.
I move through the crowd, offering canapes and topping up glasses of Prosecco, kissing cheeks, and exchanging stories of what I am ‘doing’ now. From my Leaving Cert to college to New York to I’ve decided to write a book? to Yes, I’m thrilled with the response!
That gathering of the same faces every Christmas morning for as long as I can remember has marked the passage of time so precisely. What 2020 has in store for me, a quiet, muffled affair, hardly seems like Christmas at all.
But then I stop and I think of other years where Christmas didn’t fit into its normal parameters. 1997, when a ferocious storm left thousands of homes across Ireland without electricity for days, my own included. My father’s cousins own Fernhill House Hotel and they cooked our turkey, while my mother hobbled together some potato dish and vegetables on a portable gas stove, the kind you’d take on a camping trip.
We invited our neighbours to share our ‘feast’ and as we sat around the table, singing songs by candlelight, a day which had threatened to be so disappointing turned into one full of joy and laughter. 1999, two months after my uncle had died. My sister refused to open any presents and my mother would sneak off occasionally, returning with red eyes and smudged mascara, while we all pretended that we didn’t know she had been crying.
Then, 2006. I had been in St John of Gods for a couple of months at that point and every time I passed the nurse’s station in December, festooned with tinsel and a cheap, fake tree nestled in the corner of the room, a tremor of something cold would run down my spine. I’m not supposed to be here, I wanted to shout, this isn’t supposed to be my life. I drank a litre of water before my morning weigh- in and the nurse sighed, knowing what I have done, but reluctantly agreed to allow me home to Clonakilty on Christmas Eve. Someone drove me back to the hospital on St Stephen’s Day and that night, I sat on my single bed and sobbed for everything I felt I had lost. I was 21 years old.
I’m telling you this, not to brush off your fears with a blithe “oh, it’s only one year!” but to remind you that despite everything, we will be okay. We will get through this. Maybe you’re lonely. Maybe you’re heartbroken or maybe you’re upset you won’t see your grandchildren open their presents.
Maybe you’re grieving and you’re in so much pain that it feels hard to be alive. It’s never a good time to be carrying fear or loss or sorrow but somehow, at Christmas, everything feels heightened. We’re supposed to be happy this time of year, we think. Where is our Christmas miracle? I don’t know.
But I think we need to allow this Christmas to take the shape it will, no matter how unwieldy. There will be recovery, after this. There will be hope and renewal and better things to come. There will be a time, many years from now, when you will look back at all of this and marvel at your own strength, your own resilience. You can do this, I promise.
Dash and Lily is romantic and sweet and New York at Christmas time has never looked prettier. A good one to watch with your teens, too. On Netflix now.
Decoder Ring. This excellent podcast is about cracking cultural mysteries, from the ‘Sad Jennifer Aniston’ memes to Cabbage Patch Kids.
