We learned that song as we learned to sing in four parts and round our Buffalo vowels. Jeffrey looked much younger than his 14 years. It was the beginning of his love of music.
In those days, our backyard was enough for five kids and a rose garden, some 20 bushes. Dad had the green thumb. Mom loved those roses, and Dad knew it. She said they smiled at her. In the middle of those roses stood a plastic Mary. The Mother of the Lord had pride of place.
It was Christmastime, and Dad wasn’t doing well. I was to come to Buffalo as soon as I could. Dad was holding onto life until we all gathered with Mom. At the funeral home, Mom and I fingered through countless pious memorial cards, none of which was Dad. “Oh, look,” my mother said. “That one looks like our wedding invitation.” A simple white card with a rose embossed. “That’s the one.”
Six lonely years Mom was without Dad. She bore that grudge against God with the energy and passion with which she did most things. But she always liked Mary, one woman to another.
Mom died on a bright cold Buffalo morning three days before Christmas. The arrangements at the funeral home went easily, the same as Dad’s, including that memorial card, the rose.
Two years later, I was coming from a Christmas reception and my phone rang. I recognized the number, Jeffrey’s case worker. This couldn’t be good. It wasn’t. He had succumbed to the demons that haunted him. His music, his sharp wit, his vexing habit of calling out a nonsense and his disease so poorly understood…a combination not meant for this world.
Dad, Mom, my brother…but Christmastime is no less joyful, just more heartfelt. The Christ came to share in our life and our love all the way to a bitter crucified end. Without that truth, there’s no Christmas, not the real thing anyway.
There’s a heavy bronze plaque in a cemetery in Southern California, far from the cold winter of Buffalo, that bears His cross flanked by roses in relief, with three Christmastime dates, and the three names: Richard, Genevieve, Jeffrey.
“Flowers,” wrote poet Park Benjamin, “are love’s truest language.”
“…well in the midst of winter when half was spent the night.”
