The girl in the picture, the one beside me

I’m sitting here reading the comments people have made on my Facebook profile picture.  It is a picture of my sister, Barbara, and I on Christmas morning probably in 1968 or ’69 if I had to guess.  She’s modeling an Indian dress and necklace, and I’m holding her finger and seem to be quite happy it’s Christmas and I got a new doll buggy.  She looks like she would rather be in the picture alone, but I’m hanging in there so she goes along with it.  I changed the picture tonight to one of the two of us, again on Christmas morning, probably taken in 1984 or ’85, if I had to guess.  This time I am not gripping her finger, but we both seem to be happy about whatever is going on off camera.  It was Christmas, so of course we were happy.  

I think of Barbara the most at Christmas.  I think it was her favorite day of the year, much less her favorite holiday.  She was like a child at Christmas.  I remember one year while waiting on the rest of the family to get to Mama’s house on Christmas morning, she got so excited she threw up.  Mind you, she was probably 30.   I don’t think she would care I shared this with the world, because I laughed at her all day about it, and every year thereafter, so she was used to it.

It’s funny how I can’t remember the little details of our last Christmas together at Mama’s house.  The year would have been 1992.  I know this because the next year was the first year my family spent Christmas away from Mama’s.  We spent it at my sister, Marilyn’s new house.  It was large enough for us to spread out, and I think we were going to make a new tradition of it.  That was also the same year on Thanksgiving Day Barbara gave my two sisters and me matching silver Santa pendants.   I probably didn’t think much of it at the time, but I do now.  In fact every Thanksgiving I don my Santa pendant and wear it everyday until Christmas.  I think of her as I wear it Christmas shopping and feel her with me.  I silently consult with her on certain purchases to see if they would be something she would buy.  Afterall, she was the master shopper.

The next year, Christmas 1994, was another break of tradition for my family.  We didn’t spend it at Marilyn’s house, or Mama’s.  No, we spent it at my brother’s house in Birmingham, Alabama, because Barbara was in a coma in the heart transplant unit at the UAB hospital.  I remember rushing Christmas morning at my own house with my then 15 month-old son so we could get in the car and get to Birmingham as fast as we could.  That was the year Barbara gave the entire family the best Christmas present she ever gave anyone.  That was the year when all of us, all seven plus her husband, were piled in her tiny ICU room amid the machines and tubing, and she surfaced from her coma just enough to smile at us when we told her it was Christmas and we were all there with her.  She did not come all the way out of her coma on that day, but I know she knew we were there.  I’m certain of it.

There is a bond shared by sisters and brothers that is only loosed in death.  I don’t think it can ever be broken entirely.  In life you share the same parents, family, history, heritage and home.  That piece of me that was the bond between Barbara and me fell asleep with her and I have felt an empty place in my being ever since.  Most times the emptiness is shallow, but sometimes, like Christmas, it gets a little deeper.  Along with our bond, the magic Christmas once held for me fell asleep as well.

Had it not been for the need to create a Christmas spirit for my children I think I would have given up long ago.  Not that there have not been glimmers here and there of what it used to be.   And this year will be the first Christmas without my mother, the true driving force of the holiday.  She and Barbara shared the same zeal for Christmas.  The joy they both shared for this one day of the year was overflowing.  When you combine that overflowing joy and multiply it by the number of Christmases they had between them, then surely there is still enough of that joy floating around out there to shine down on me for years to come.

The first Christmas without is always the hardest, especially, when you have had the best all of the years before.  But with all that joy shining down from Mama and Barbara, then I’m sure I’ll “muddle through somehow”.