It was Christmas night, 2019. At the table beside ours, a recent widow told me about her late husband. My daughter, 11 years old then, bopped between a couple of strollers, each holding a tiny wagging dog. Their owners were older women, at least one of whom had retired from a career in theater — which she said in three syllables (“thee-AY-ter”). Couples laughed and sang a Christmas carol, and our glasses were never empty.
This unlikely gaggle of strangers, some of us in mourning, others just orphaned by fate, came together in a hotel bar and restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif., on this familiest of family holidays. It was probably the freest Christmas of my life.
My father died six days earlier. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive soft tissue cancer two weeks before his death. He’d avoided going to the doctor for as long as he could, and when he was finally diagnosed, we knew he didn’t have long, but we assumed a few months, at least.
Within hours of his death, my daughter and I flew from our home in Washington, D.C., to Arizona, where he’d lived. We met my brother, Joshua, who had traveled from New Jersey — and we embarked on the sobering tasks required of death in America. We arranged for cremation, ordered death certificates, canceled credit cards. I said a final goodbye, alone, to my father at a funeral home.
We discovered one small secret after another in my father’s bedroom, enough of them to complicate the grief we felt. He had a certificate declaring him a soldier in the army of an evangelical megachurch minister. There was a MAGA hat. There was more than a decade of correspondence between my dad and the Internal Revenue Service, in which he tried to avoid paying taxes and the I.R.S. tried to compel him.
And then there was the gun. A brand-new 9-millimeter handgun, in his old beat-up briefcase with the broken zipper.
We were not a family that owned guns. The gun was indicative of how far my father had traveled — emotionally, intellectually, politically — from my brother and me. My white-collar father holding a handgun to keep a bad guy at bay was a tragicomic image. I relinquished the gun at the local police station the morning before Christmas.
Nothing felt right. I vowed that we would not spend Christmas at the generic chain hotel off the highway where we were staying. I reminded Joshua of how our dad loved a good road trip. What was stopping us from going somewhere right then? It would be a way for us to remember the good parts of him. We took out our phones and looked at Google Maps, searching for a decent destination within driving distance.
Palm Springs was five hours due west. We drove my father’s Honda S.U.V., booking a last-minute room at an upscale hotel. By the time the sun had set on Christmas Eve, the three of us were checking in. On Christmas morning, we drove to Joshua Tree National Park. Most of the other visitors I recall were tourists from China and Japan. We climbed rock formations and snapped photos in silly poses. Had we not had access to a calendar, we wouldn’t have even known it was Christmas.
That evening, we ate at the hotel, with the widow and the singing couples and the older ladies and their dogs. I told them stories about my dad. He was a salesman. He was an extrovert. You could stick him in a room of strangers, and he’d know everyone’s story by the end of the night. He was an excellent basketball player and a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. He was terrible with money. He was sometimes violent when I was a kid, and he did not know what to do with his grief after my mom died. He did not like conventional medicine. He prayed. And after I turned 16 and no longer lived with him, we didn’t spend holidays together.
Holidays have always been fraught for me, a reminder of how little family I have. For years, I spent Christmas with my friend Ann’s parents. Or sometimes with an aunt and uncle. There have been random Christmases when I went with people I hardly knew to their family’s home and I would remind myself not to do that again next year. I’ve spent Christmases in Cuba, Honduras, Cambodia, England — anywhere but my hometown. It doesn’t help that my birthday is the day after Christmas. A double-dose reminder of how solitary life can feel when you think of yourself as an orphan.
But that Christmas in 2019 turned out to be one of the best I ever had, because it was entirely free of expectations, in a place where no one had any history or claim. There were no gifts and, at least for those of us who were hotel guests, no cooking, no dishes, no decorations to pack up and store. We were a snapshot of joy, strangers communing with abandon.
Part of this, it seems to me, is exactly what a holiday ought to be: a true celebration of life, of gratitude, even of grief among people with no mandate to give something in return. None of us were trying to fit into someone else’s family. And none of us were pretending that life wasn’t hard and awful a lot of the time. And I wonder, when strangers offer us a moment distilled to its most important essence, can being untethered to anything familiar sometimes be a blessing?
At one point the widow began to cry, and we crowded around her, holding her in our eccentric little group. All of us had our own histories and tragedies that had led us to that strange and beautiful place. And when the day finished, we’d all return to whatever our real lives were. We’d never see one another again; I’m not even sure we exchanged names. But on that one Christmas night, the holiday lights twinkled, and all the hardest things about life felt momentarily suspended.
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