How We Celebrated the Holidays When My Son Had Cancer

My grandfather died on December 21, 1982. The shortest — and darkest — day of the year. Cancer, of course. My brothers and I drove with our dad from Cleveland to Massachusetts for the funeral, where my mom had been for the previous week. It was the first time we’d ever not spent Christmas in our own home, where my grandparents usually came to stay with us. After the funeral service on Christmas Eve, my grandmother went to lie down, and my brothers and I ended up in her basement, one of our favorite places in her house (we’d spent many vacations rollerskating around and around on that smooth concrete floor). But this time we searched through her neatly stacked boxes until we found some labeled “Christmas.” We quietly lugged everything upstairs and by the time my grandmother awoke from her nap, we’d decorated a small fake tree in the living room and hung stockings over the fireplace. Just because our Grampy was gone didn’t mean we had to give up Christmas!

She talked about that day until she died, a physically broken but emotionally whole old lady, more than 20 years later.

To me, the holidays are about finding the light in the darkness. Placing candles in the window to light the way for those outside on these short winter days. Bringing the evergreen tree inside when all else is bare, to remind ourselves that life is still out there, that spring will eventually come.

When your child has cancer, the light and the dark, the circle and the cycle of life, feel ever more important. Everything is suddenly meaningful — little things like eating dinner as a family and big things like spending Christmas at home. When my Austin relapsed at age 3 in December 2009, the dark days were upon us in more ways than one.

Relapse is scary. Scarier than the first time, for us, at least. It means that whole army you employed, the full-on assault you launched on your child’s small body, simply wasn’t enough. It means cancer was stronger than the strongest medicines. And that is terrifying. But you do it again. You load a fake Christmas tree into the car, and you decorate every inch of that hospital room with anything sparkly and shiny you can find. You light the darkness because there is simply no other way. You hold on to hope and you force yourself to remember that spring will come.

Even on the darkest days.

We actually went home that year, a few days before Christmas, and returned to the hospital for chemo and radiation shortly after. But we spent Christmas Eve surrounded by family and friends and we celebrated all that we had with full hearts. We awoke in our own home, a family of four, to open presents in front of the fireplace, to snuggle and laugh and take lots and lots of pictures. Never far from our minds was the thought — that fear that is impossible for the parents of the sick to shake — that this might be the last Christmas we would spend together.

And now, here we are, three years later, a family of four, alive, intact, together. Two little boys quickly morphing into big boys. Healthy and happy and pretty darn close to normal. Lighting the darkness in their own special ways each and every day.