The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Originally written during the blackout

Hitting bottom is not found by way of some cataclysmic event. Finding your way to the end of all that matters is a long and arduous passage full of lingering doubt and fatigue. Hitting bottom isn’t about being nervous, senseless worry for what is going to happen. Hitting bottom is giving up all hope that you have to worry about anything happening ever again.

And that is where we would find ourselves this Christmas. The end of the road, a nightmare reality that paled in comparison to the one we found ourselves in just twelve months before, dancing with the ghosts of an Irish pub and the fireworks of Christmas being launched across the harbor above. Christmas Eve had come to pass.

For the past decade I had spent my Christmas Eves with my Grandfather. We would have the most memorable evenings together. Every year we would watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, and even though every year he made sure that I knew he was tired of watching the same movie time and again, I knew he loved it as much as I did. Afterwards, we would always watch a world war two movie, and in the moments of holidays of past, I would hear the most unimaginable stories.

But this holiday marked the third of which I was left without such comfort, and though time passes on, the evening would never have a hold like it did back then.

Until that day then.

Unemployed for seven months and without any hope of that tomorrow would bring a new day. The Hong Kong syndrome had been a failure. Twenty-seven years old and nothing to show for it. In the days before this my two closest friends had begun their lives together, as I watched on in a solemn anticipation from the other side of the country. They had made it to the endgame. I was nowhere to be found.

The morning of Christmas Eve had arrived once more. The chase to the bottom can be more than some people should have to deal with, and that depression, the burden taken away from us all signs of life, it proved to be too much reality for her. And so once again I would lose a friend to the ghosts of days of long past, and they would wash over me in crushing waves. On this day though I tried to make right as we exchanged token presents of appreciation of what we once meant to each other in another lifetime. But it was obvious to no one in particular, the cold behind my eyes told the story before it ever began, there was nothing left to be gained. It was not her time to live with the ghosts.

Driving home to a thankless and irrelevant Christmas Eve with a family that had lost all interest, the last of the December sun shining down. Our thoughts drift back to those that had turned their backs on me, justified for not wanting to be dragged down to this self loathing and wallowing that I had perfected. That hero we used to know, that hero we used to be, so long ago, so very far away. Sadness. Happiness. Joy, anger, aggression, passion. Emotion. I felt none of them anymore. There was nothing left inside of me of any redeeming quality. I needed a touchstone to the way things were, I needed some semblance of feeling. A connection to the past if there ever was one, and a connection that couldn’t remember my name.

My Grandmother had been in a nursing home for years since the onset of Alzheimer’s. Therein lies the good and the bad, and on this particular evening, I needed everything she had left to offer. In our moments together, as I tried to explain to her what had happened and where everything had gone so very wrong, from my adventures in China to the sickening reality that now was, I confessed to all of the good and all of the bad that had been locked away within me for so long. And there she sat in her wheelchair, none the wiser to the world at large, listening attentively but remembering none of it, nodding her head in agreement at every pause in the story. This was not my Christmas Eve as I remembered from those moments long ago. This was not the same woman that I knew as a child. An empty shell of a person. No emotion, nothing behind those eyes of hers. She was as dead to the world as I felt inside and there was nothing either of us could have done about it.

A man near the entrance of the nursing home sat slumped over in his wheelchair, a bible in one hand and a rosary in the other. As I was leaving, repressing to the sight of any semblance of emotion of a grandmother who couldn’t help forgetting my name, I leaned over and touched the old man’s hand. Just as I had done a lifetime ago in The Blessing Way, I wished him as meaningfully as I could a merry Christmas. The old man awoke from his slumber, alert as his head rose to reveal a black and white collar underneath. The priest. And he took my hand and said hello, and asked why I was there alone on Christmas Eve. We talked for half an hour about our lives and how we both wound up in that foyer on that cold and unfamiliar night. This old man telling me his stories of a day long ago, trying to reassure me that everything was going to be all right. As I walked away he said to me in closing, 'thank you Jay, talking to you was the best Christmas present I could have asked for.' And emotion, she returned to me once again.

Returning home to that familiar seat in the kitchen we had once dreamt about finding while lost in what was Hong Kong; where we now dreaded ending every night. But our Christmas Eve would return to that plan once again as we watched our movie alone, and it was a Wonderful Life after all. And so the tradition continued. I adorned our finest suit and put on my Grandfather’s favorite tie for the occasion. I dressed for the moment, and went to that midnight mass, a return to the church after fifteen years apart. My life was in shambles, my friends had deserted me, there was no hero left, the big bad was gone. No job, no life, no hope of it ever getting any better. I needed your help. I could not do this on my own. With my hands shaking and emotion washing over me again in waves I wasn’t going to make it another day on my own. On my knees before all that was holy, after so long astray I did not deserve your help, but on this night I prayed to the church to forgive me, to save my life once more.

As timing is forever linked to what we are given, my brother, lost in the wind for months, calls me the moment I stepped out of the church. His adventures had led him to a cheap motel on the westside of Chicago, alone on Christmas Eve, and needing something to hold on to.

We can be heroes.

And so it began again, despite how angry I was at him for letting his family worry for so long, whether he was dead or alive, it was never an option, I never had any choice. My grandparents would not want my little brother to be alone in a motel on Christmas Eve, no matter what had happened in the past.

Christmas morning as midnight had come and gone. The expressways are empty except for one jeep, firing on all cylinders as fast as it would take me. There is an idea of a James McLaughlin, and I had abandoned that idea for far too long. We are heroes. I can handle the weight of the world, because it is what I’m supposed to do, it is what I know how to do. And there we sat in that motel, our Christmas together, making sure neither of us had to spend that evening on our own.

In the morning I brought my brother home for the first time in months to a family that had already opened presents without us. As he was able to spend a few hours with his family, a Christmas that he deserved, I went upstairs to that room I had locked myself away in for those months before. I had lost so many friends since I had returned; I had lost them all to the distance that is the other side of the world. And on that morning I would find the closure I so desperately needed on the ones that meant the most as I wrote to them the Once Upon a Time series.

My thoughts were taken back to that church just a few hours before, as I kneeled before judge and jury asking for forgiveness, for all these things I have done that I deserve no such thing for. I could not do this on my own anymore. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t understand why this had happened to me. Please God help me, please give me a chance, let me show you I can be that hero again, I can save the world if you just give me the chance. Please. I am not dead yet. Don’t let me live the ghosts any longer...

On the morning of December 26th, thirty hours after my prayer of last resort, I received an email stating simply “we have reviewed your resume and would like to have you come in for an interview.”

And everything was going to be all right.