By Bill Wundram
Quad City Times – 25 Dec 2004
Even in the Christmas season when there’s a song in the air and a star in the sky, death is not a pleasant visitor or one to easily dismiss. We live with death. As a newsman, I’ve mostly come to know death as someone else’s sadness. You see it as a headline, or a listing on the obituary page. Together, we know death as a loss. It’s an empty helplessness for which there is no closure, felt sharply for family and friends or even in the abstract, as in the tragic deaths of two little girls this week in the Quad-City region.
Death takes no holiday, even at Christmas.
When death comes close to us, we try to understand, and we cannot. Pain Nye has been with the, Quad-City Times nearly 20 years as a sales representative. She answered the phone on Tuesday, expecting the routine. Her face paled. “What’s the matter?” she asked. Her voice grew louder. Her co-workers turned around. Then came the repeated words: “No. No. No. No.” There was a scream that wrenched the entire first floor of this big newspaper building, reaching every office and corner. Her colleagues reacted as family. She had been told that her 33-year-old son, Steven, was dead of a heart condition.
Christmas is always a glorious event for Pam’s big family With Steven’s death and his funeral on Monday, there was little question that Pam’s Christmas would be canceled this year. But then an apparition, as if from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” — “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”
Says Pam: “At 4 a.m. the morning after my son’s death, something happened. I was startled in my sleep. I don’t know if it was a dream or a vision. But my son clearly appeared and he said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to go ahead with Christmas. Keep doing it. Do this one for me. You’ve got to do it for all the kids.’” And so, Pam held Christmas. There were presents and giggles and baubles and lights, on the tinseled tree for 26 members of the Ramirez family, even though…
We all face death and it is all around us. “Whom the gods love die young, no matter how long they live,” said Elbert Hubbard, the noted philosopher/writer. Death fractures a family. Death is not fair. For many, this will be the first Christmas they have faced without a mother, a father, a child or a friend. There is no fairness in a death during the holidays. We wonder what satisfaction that death may claim at this season, but there is a gain that we all may grasp — at any time — as a gift. The gift is the precious memories of a loved one.
Recently, I dined with a scholarly dean from a noted university. Unexpectedly, the subject of souls and life after death came up. “Certainly, God cannot have a great big front porch where all of his children can gather after death,” I said. He answered, “Of course not, but their souls are always around us. Every time we suddenly think of them, they are with us. Maybe angels, you could call them.”
It reminds of Jimmy Stewart and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” To paraphrase, “every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” There is a Christmas gift that all of us should remember, a gift of angels or whatever; the gift to us are the memories of those we have lost, even though…