"The First No L": Christmas and the End of "Annus Horribilis"

And so we come to the end of our – to borrow a phrase from Queen Elizabeth – annus horibilis.  Amazingly, it has been eight months since Leslie died.  It seemed like a good time to give a “state of the family” update and, in short, we are doing well.

This morning’s “New York Times” Sunday Styles section has a piece about last words.  They talked of the difficulty of anticipating which words will be last, and therefore the importance of speaking one’s peace early on.  I couldn’t tell you what Leslie’s last words were and, given the degree to which she was sedated in later days, they might not have been entirely coherent (I’m not sure, “you should know that I don’t share my mochi” would qualify as ‘famous last words’).

What the article doesn’t mention is that the greatly loved have no “last” words, since their voices remain in our heads.  It’s hard to go a day without Caroline or Emily or I quoting Leslie (for example, our annual holiday hot fudge is not a liquid but a ‘colloidal suspension’).

At Leslie’s memorial service, I spoke about her love for tradition, Christmas traditions in particular, and our determination to carry on with ours this year.  I have to admit that preparations felt empty much of the time – rehearsals for “Nutcracker” were difficult and at times autonomic, and shopping and cooking for our caroling party felt more chore-like (chore-lish?) than usual.

The events themselves, however, were lustrous and buoyant, just the balm needed for a Christmas season where “through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow” was more mocking than hopeful.

The Hyde Park School of Dance dedicated this year’s “Nutcracker” performances to Leslie.  They ensured that she would continue to watch over the opening party scene in which she’d danced for 10 years; her silhouette was painted onto a column on the set.  Her stage husband and I addressed the audience before each performance, and the school announced a scholarship in Leslie’s name for “a student who combines passion for learning and exploration in the studio with generosity toward other dancers and HPSD in and out of the studio."

As soon as people started arriving for the caroling party, the ambivalence ebbed.  Full house, full dining table, full voices, and no one left without the perennial jar of fudge.

A recent tradition in our family has been to travel over Christmas, and this year we joined with the girls’ “second mom” Katie and her kids in Charleston.  It was the ideal ‘no pressure’ trip, with time for jigsaw puzzles and games, beach walks and architecture ogling, and most of all great food.

We go into 2013 with lots of healing still to do, but hopeful signs for each of us. Emily just debuted a new piece of choreography dedicated to Leslie, won two baking contests at college, and loved the computer science programming course she took at the urging of her boyfriend Joey.

Caroline is enveloped by an amazing group of friends, deeply immersed in the art and science of teaching children on the autism spectrum, and applying to graduate programs in school psychology.

I’ve vastly overcommitted for January and February, and so will spend much of the month airborne, but the opportunities were too good to pass up.  Just recently, I was named a Senior Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, which will provide a new outlet for my writing, put me in engaging and challenging intellectual company, and provide the almost-inconceivable honor of placing my name in the same sentence as my children’s media hero.  I’m returning to marathoning in April in London, one of the very few races still on my bucket list.

The Tetris pieces of life going forward haven’t started falling with any discernable pattern – keep the Center going or try something new, stay in Chicago or move elsewhere, keep the house or move somewhere smaller.  Every once in a while, in a fit of ambition, I fill a bag with things to get rid of, or donate Leslie’s science books to Lab School, or organize papers; then the enormity of four stories of accumulated life overwhelms me, and I take a nap.