The most important thing in the world is to tell our children the truth, but we lie to them all the time. By “we,” I don’t mean people in general, and by “our children,” I don’t mean children in general. I mean my wife and I lie to our daughter, Moxie, and our son, Zolten, right to their beautiful little smiling faces. We tell our loving little children, who must trust us with their very lives, that Disneyland is never open except when we’re already planning on taking them there. We tell them the frozen yogurt place is closed after dinner on Wednesdays, and that’s after we’ve lied that frozen yogurt is ice cream. The frozen yogurt place stretches the truth that frozen yogurt is even one wispy RCH healthier than ice cream. The frozen yogurt people may be stretching the truth, but we are lying sacks of shit to the people we care most about in our lives. It’s not preplanned lying, it’s lazy lying.
I feel weird about lying to my children every time I do it. I do it less than my wife, but only because I do less child wrangling than my wife. I try to tell them the real reason I want them to do or not do something, but the real reason is often “Because I said so.”
Maybe it is better just to lie.
Emily and I don’t lie to our children about Santa Claus.
Santa Claus is an atheist battleground. Some do, some don’t. Michael Goudeau does, and he certainly has his atheist/skeptical cred. He’s the real deal in the no-god camp. He’s won a Writers Guild award and has been nominated for a zillion Emmys (another lie we tell: “It’s an honor just to be nominated”) for writing with us on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He was the cohost on my radio show for a couple of years, and he’s been my close friend forever. We agree on almost everything except sports (he likes them), his shitty musical taste (he has it), and Santa Claus (he lies about him). I know a lot of great dads and Goudeau is one of them.
Every Xmas time, Goudeau argues with my wife about Santa. I think the Goudeaus do the whole production—coming down the chimney, milk and cookies, reindeer, you name some winter seasonal bullshit and the Goudeaus do it. The Jillettes don’t do any of it. Not really. This year my wife bent a little and we had a “The Jillettes Don’t Celebrate Xmas Tree.” It wasn’t even a pine tree, and no angels. And not one piece of reindeer shit. I’m not sure I’m that against Santa Claus myself (it seems like a bit less of a lie than the yogurt thing), but, man, my wife sure has a hard-on for that jolly little elf.
In interviews, when I’m asked “How do you atheists celebrate Xmas?” I answer that the Jillette atheists don’t do anything. The interviewer assumes that I’m the goofy Scrooge and I’m denying our children the joy of Xmas. I am denying our children the joy of Xmas, but I’m sure doing it with my wife’s blessing, so to speak. It was her idea, but I’ll take responsibility. I agree with her. I agree with her because she’s right. I love Goudeau, but I don’t sleep with him every night. Another friend of mine, a cynical socialist (isn’t that redundant?), insisted that his daughter be force-fed Santa, so when the disillusionment hit her hard, she’d crash and throw out the baby Jesus with the Santa bathwater. This is the same guy who wanted to send his daughter to Catholic school to be sure she’d be a hard-core atheist her whole life. Socialists love that manipulation shit. It’s good that he couldn’t convince his wife to go along with him.
I love tradition and I love ritual. My mom and dad’s Jillette household celebrated Xmas with all the trimmings. We had a tree with those bubbling lights that never really worked, and we strung colored popcorn. We had a crèche on top of the TV with real straw and a wax candle Santa standing in the nativity, a bit out of place at three times the size of the wise men, wearing arctic clothing and with a waxy wick sticking out of his red hat. Monster giant Santa stood laughing at the baby Jesus standing next to an out-of-scale giant Styrofoam Frosty the Snowman, who looked higher than Keith Richards in the basement at Nellcôte. Once you’re buying virgin birth and dying for other people’s sins, a talking snowman and a fat elf in a flying sleigh is easy.
I’ve had a bone to pick with Frosty since I was a child. I begin ranting about Frosty incessantly from the first time Xmas music pops up on the radio until about Valentine’s Day, when Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” takes over my head. The song “Frosty the Snowman” makes me crazy: “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around.” Correlation is not causation, you stupid Gene Autry and the Cass County Boys song–composing motherfucker! It’s this kind of sloppy thinking that is the real “reason for the season.” Oh, and the other reindeer didn’t all love Rudolph for any sort of humanitarian (reindeeratarian?) reason, they just needed him for his bioluminescent nose that one night—we know they will all go back to disrespecting him, laughing at him, shunning him, and calling him names the first moderately unfoggy Xmas Eve that rolls around.
My mom and dad lied to me about Santa. When I was very young, my dad was a jail guard and he had to work Xmas morning, so we had our celebration on Xmas Eve, and it was explained to me that Santa started his annual journey in New England, because we were so close to the North Pole. I bought it.
Many Xmas people think that only those with bitter childhood Xmas memories would deprive their children of Xmas, but I have only fond memories of Xmas with my mom and dad. Even when Mom and Dad’s Xmas tree changed to plastic, then finally to a little ceramic one my mom made at a senior center crafts class to sit on top of the TV, I still loved Xmas with my mom and dad. I liked my mom’s system of keeping the cards with the toys so I could write all my thank-yous. I liked the zillion Mounds bars that I vomited up one Xmas morning that put me off candy coconut to this day. I liked my mom and dad marveling at the shoebox-size brick of a first cell phone that Teller gave me one year. My mom and dad felt a joy in watching me open presents, a joy they said I would only understand once I had children. They were right, but I don’t get that joy from my children on December 25, and we don’t talk about Santa Claus. Our children hear about Santa Claus from their peers, but he’s less of a big deal in that circle than Dora the Explorer. And since I tore Frosty a new snowy and coal asshole, allow me to bitch that “Dora” and “explorer” don’t rhyme any more than “action” and “Jackson,” unless you’re a lobsterman in Maine. When the movie Action Jackson came out, Teller was suggesting slug lines: “Action Jackson: it’s just assonance,” and “Action Jackson: you tell him it doesn’t rhyme.” Unfortunately, Carl Weathers never consulted Teller.
“Let’s take the Christ out of Xmas” would be a fine slogan for the Winter Solstice, and American advertising has done some wonderful work toward that goal. The right-wing fucking nut jobs are correct—Xmas is becoming secularized. That’s a good thing. It’s secular to the point that the Christ part of Xmas doesn’t really piss the Jillettes off too much. I just wish that those who are secularizing Xmas (or taking it back from the Christians—it did start out as a pagan holiday) would admit they want it secular to sell more shit to more different people. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend, Linda.† She was way smart (still is) and way sexy (still is). My parents never talked to me about sex or drugs, but her parents talked about little else. They were liberals. They listened to Bob Dylan (maybe not literally, but in my memory they were playing Blonde on Blonde all the time) and had The Joy of Sex on their coffee table, probably in Spanish (I was too embarrassed to open it). They read novels in Spanish. They took a bus from Massachusetts to Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam war. They were totally groovy liberals who I’m sure are now fine with all the killing overseas, because Obama is in charge and he’s liberal. In high school their daughter and I had an opportunity to go to Cape Cod and stay on a houseboat together. We were so excited because we’d get a chance to sleep together. Really sleep. We’d done every sex act known to Henry Miller, but we hadn’t really slept together. We’d never heard each other snore. We were very excited. My parents were fine with my going to Cape Cod with Linda. If they hadn’t been fine, we would have had to talk about sex, and my parents sure weren’t going to do that. We were old-style New England. Her parents were okay with us going to Cape Cod, like they were liberally okay with us fucking, but made a comment that they knew we didn’t care about Cape Cod (who does?), we were just going to stay on the houseboat so we could sleep together. Linda was so fucking insulted and angry. She was outraged. How could her parents say something like that? She wanted them to say we wanted to go to Cape Cod for . . . what? For the . . . cod? She was offended that they didn’t believe we were going to Cape Cod as tourists and we would just happen to stay on a houseboat. She felt they should take us at our word. She thought they should act like they believed the lie.
Linda was just embarrassed about her parents talking about us sleeping together. She was embarrassed, but this is one of the things that bugs me so much about some liberals that I’ve known. I’m writing about liberals that I know personally. I’m not writing about liberals in general—I don’t know liberals in general. The self-identified “progressives” and “liberals” that I know are bitter fucking manipulative hateful whack jobs. The self-identified “Tea Party” people I know are bitter fucking manipulative hateful whack jobs. The common denominator is not politics. The common denominator is me. The liberals I know will say that medical marijuana is a foot in the door, the first step to legalizing marijuana for everyone. And when the right wing accuses them of wanting that same exact thing, they ridicule the right-wingers and say “What about the people suffering horribly from cancer who need to toke?” My liberal friends think the literal reading of the Bible is nonsense and we should celebrate other religions and cultures, and when the right says “They’re trying to take the Christ out of Christmas,” liberals go bug-fucking-nutty. Just about everyone who writes and produces comedy on TV is a fucking lefty and is pushing the agenda of gay rights and liberal causes, and my liberal friends—even though they’re against the fucking corporations running TV—are thrilled with those writers, but when the fucking psycho right wing says the TV writers are doing just what they’re doing, my liberal friends scoff. I think that’s why my lefty friends are so comfortable calling the Tea Party people racist, even though the Tea Party doesn’t say they themselves are racist. My lefty friends just assume that everyone lies about their real agenda. Racism is evil collectivist bullshit, marijuana (and all drugs—fuck the FDA) should be legal, let’s get the Christ out of Xmas, and Linda and I were going to Cape Cod to sleep together and have intense pre-AIDS, no-holes-barred teenage sex.
And Hollywood is lefty. So what? You can say what you want about Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, but we don’t fucking lie about our agenda. We are libertarian atheists, and even though most of our shows aren’t about that (as a matter of fact it would be hard to tell any of that from our live show in Vegas), if you do read some atheist libertarian vibe in something we do, it’s probably because we put it there. Why wouldn’t oversimplifying, heartless, childish libertarians put their crazy selfish ideas in their shows, just like the commie TV writers put their shit in their situation comedies?
Just fucking cop to it.
As much as I’d love Xmas to be a celebration of commercialism with no religious overtones, it’s not quite all the way there yet. I’m sure it’ll get there. Commercialism is beautiful and wonderful and open and real, and belief in Jesus is superficial and creepy zombie stuff. If the urban legend about Santa being created by Coca-Cola were true, I might be able to get behind it, but Santa still has too much baggage on his sleigh besides toys.
The Goudeaus lied to their children completely, but the Goudeau children worked together and finally figured out that there was no Santa Claus. Joey, the older brother, started it off with the tooth fairy. He busted his mom and said, “So you and Dad are the tooth fairy?” Theresa answered, “Yes, Joey,” and Joey followed up with the logical conclusion: “So you and Dad fly all over the world taking children’s teeth out from under their pillows and giving them money?” Yup, that was his thinking. He told his little sister, Emily Peach, and she went the other way with the logical conclusion, and after Joey and Emily talked for a while, the tooth fairy, Santa, and the Easter Bunny all bit the dust. It was Mom and Dad, and there was no flying-around-the-world involved at all.
Our children are four and five, and surprisingly Santa doesn’t come up too much. It’s kind of like god—selling the shit is hard; not selling the shit is easy. It just doesn’t come up much. But we’re trying to create our own traditions. I’ve already mentioned one of them: when someone sneezes, we don’t say “God bless you.” We weren’t even comfortable with “Bless you.” “Gesundheit” is really fun to say, but it’s about “healthiness,” and that’s a little too Colbert for our family’s taste. So we go with “That’s funny.” We say “That’s funny” when someone sneezes, because it is funny, and we say “That’s really funny” when someone sneezes a second time. It can get pretty hilarious when the pollen comes out and gets blown around in the desert. “That’s funny” started with my friends in high school loving to say “gesundheit” after anyone said “nephew” or “a shoe” (puns are important to nerds), but that left us with nothing to say after a sneeze. “That’s funny” covered it. While other students were tagging cars, shooting dope, and reading literature, we were figuring out how to react properly to sneezes and words that sound like sneezes. In our children’s preschool, our children have said “Bless you” a few times, but all the children there say “That’s funny.” Further support for Jefferson’s conviction that good ideas would drive out bad ones in the marketplace of ideas.
We’ve tried to create a Jillette winter ritual around Xmas. We’ve chosen New Year’s Day. Teller and I finally made enough money that we don’t have to work New Year’s Eve anymore. In showbiz it’s about the most lucrative night of the year, but also the most depressing. Venues pay three times what they normally would for a show. Everyone in the audience gets a hat and a noisemaker, and no one gives a fuck about the show. Every year would end with a nice big check and a show that we hated doing, so we said fuck it, and now we take New Year’s Eve off. As you know, I’ve never had a drink of alcohol or tried any recreational drug in my life. Neither did my parents. I was brought up to watch TV and eat ice cream on New Year’s Eve and that’s what I do with my children. I don’t do a show on New Year’s Day. On Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Labor Day, and Xmas, I do shows, but New Year’s Eve I’m with my family.
My mom died on New Year’s Day. When she died, I was on a plane flying to a gig in Lake Tahoe. I landed to a message on my cell phone from my sister. “One voice mail message” was a death notice. I’d been at Mom’s bedside with the morphine pump in my hand when she’d gone into a coma a few days before. Her dying wish was that I not miss any shows. She said that they had raised me to work hard and keep my commitments, and her dying was no excuse to negate the work ethic they’d tried to instill in me. So, I’ve done the trifecta. I did shows the night my dad died, the night my mom died, and the night my sister died.
When Gilbert Gottfried’s mom died, he called me. My mom had died about a year earlier and I had called him and we had gone out to dinner. During our grief we got together and made jokes in worse taste than you’ve ever heard. Our movie The Aristocrats is nothing; I’m talking about jokes that if I even hinted at obliquely, you’d put this book down and start organizing boycotts. I know that you wouldn’t be reading this book unless you were a freedom-of-speech extremist, so you wouldn’t want us arrested, but you would want us to never work again. Gilbert and I did those jokes just to each other. Horrible, unfunny, gross, hateful jokes for hours and hours, just laughing and laughing at the pain and suffering of life. Sickening jokes. Just spewing out a “fuck you” to the whole world. Yes, I remembered all the wonderful times with my mom, and yes, I cried alone for hours, but I also told jokes with Gilbert I would never let anyone else in any situation hear me tell. Jokes that I had never told. It was a time for sadness and memory, and it was also a time for pure, raw, empty hate at the pain of life.
We had dinner and made the same jokes after Gilbert’s mom died. A couple of days later Gilbert was booked to do The Hollywood Squares. He said he couldn’t think of a reason to do The Hollywood Squares after his mom had died. I said, “Yup, there’s no reason. But there’s never going to be a reason. Your mom will never be alive again. There will never be a reason to do The Hollywood Squares again. You knew your mom was going to die, so there was never a reason to do The Hollywood Squares before. There never was a reason and there never will be a reason to do The Hollywood Squares, except that that’s what we do. We’re fucking guys who do The Hollywood Squares, except now we’re fucking guys with dead mothers who do The Hollywood Squares.” I think he went and did it, I don’t know. I cared about his mom dying, but I don’t care about the fucking Hollywood Squares. If he did it, he was funny, I will bet my life on that.
Gilbert had to think about it. He had to decide when to go back to work. My mom made it easy for me. She told me I’d miss her forever, and taking a night off wasn’t going to help. She didn’t give me a choice. When my dad died, my mom lied to me. She said he was still alive when I called her from backstage at a show in Concord, New Hampshire. She kept the news from me so I could do a show that night and not be ripped apart. My sister and nephews disagreed. They thought I had a right to know, but my mom didn’t care. With no support from the family, she lied to me. She told me to hurry home to her right after the show, and I did. Friends drove me in a car for hours, and she was waiting up in her chair, crying. She told me when I got home and was with her that my father had died that afternoon. Fuck your Santa Claus in the neck; Valda Jillette loved me enough to lie to me about the death of the man she had loved her whole life. Match that with “Oh, the guy in the supermarket is one of his elves who dresses up like Santa,” motherfucker.
I lied to my mom too. When my dad got really sick, he was in the hospital on Xmas Eve. The doctors said that Samuel H. Jillette was to start in a nursing home on Xmas day. The bullshit social worker told me she would tell him and it would be okay. She was a professional, paid by the county. She was a liberal. She told him, and dad began sobbing softly. Crying was not a big deal for my dad. He was enough of a man to cry at Hallmark commercials. If you did a cheesy TV show with a horse or a family in it, my dad would cry. He would cry and wipe his eyes, and my mom would throw something at him and call him a fool. My dad taught me to cry at everything, and my mom threw shit at both of us. He cried at TV, not at real life. He did, however, sob that day. He certainly wouldn’t ever complain, but he wouldn’t be happy with the nursing home. He wouldn’t be happy away from his wife and the house they built themselves, just the two of them. But he felt he had no choice, so he sobbed.
My dad never took a penny from me. Country and western stars always buy their moms and dads houses when their first record hits, and when our Broadway show took off, I would have bought my mom and dad Dollywood, but they lived in that house they’d built together and I wasn’t going to change that. When I had more money than god in the eighties (god wasn’t doing well in the eighties), if I came home and we went out to dinner at the HoJo, my dad paid. If I’d reached for my wallet he would have been insulted. When I was forty years old and came home in a limo to go to the county fair, my dad gave me two bucks to buy a candied apple for myself. Nothing made him happier than his son taking money from him for a treat. My dad did not take money from me. I asked the social worker how my dad could stay home instead of going to a nursing home. She said he couldn’t. She said he needed nursing care around the clock. I said, “I can afford for him to have that in his home.” She said, “No home-care agency will ever start a new account tomorrow, on Xmas day.” I said, “I can make them an offer that’ll make it worth their while to start tomorrow.” Then I told her I needed a humanitarian service from her: “I need you to go in there and tell my dad that there’s a government program that will pay for him to have nursing care around the clock and he can stay home.” Little Ms. Sensitive New England County Social Worker, with the short hair and sneakers, said she didn’t lie and wouldn’t lie for me. I told her she was going to lie for me. She said no. I said, “I’ll make this simple. You go in that room and you lie to my dad and make him believe it, or I’m going to hit you as hard as I can. I’ve never hit anyone in my life, but I’m two hundred and eighty pounds and I’m pretty sure I can do some damage to an intense New England salt-and-pepper-haired social worker. You’ll call the police and I’ll go to jail, but I won’t let you ruin our family without a fight.” I don’t know if I would have really hit her, but I knew I had to make sure she would be able to give me all the blame for the lie she was being forced to tell. Her conscience was clear and she could hate me forever. I’m okay with that.
Little Ms. Down Vest lied to my dad and he came home happy. On Xmas day the health care professionals, those astronaut heroes at a low wage, those wonder men and women (ours were all women) who care for people near the end of their lives, started working around the clock for the government—which, at that Jillette house, was me. Our Xmas dinner that year was cooked by me and a home-care person, and my dad was thankful, and my mom and dad lived at home until they died. On that first Xmas night, which was supposed to find my dad in the nursing home, my mom and I had a conversation. We had it right in the room with my dad. He didn’t hear well and napped a lot, so we could talk behind his back in front of him.
My mom said, “I know very well the government isn’t paying for all this. You’re paying for this. You’re paying for all this care. That woman lied to your father and me and she did it because you made her do it. You made her lie.” I said, “Mom, if you say that louder, if you say that to Dad, he’ll throw a fit and he’ll be in a nursing home for the rest of his life, and soon you’ll be there too. If you tell my father that I’m paying for this, your daughter—my dear sister—will be so sad to have to visit him in there, and things will be much harder for her. Mom, I love you and Dad. I love you enough to lie to you to allow you to stay in your home. So, Mom . . . I promise you . . . I give you my word that I’m not paying for a penny of this home care.”
My mom looked at me with a tear in her eye, smiled a little, and said, “Well, if you give your word, I have to believe you; I know you would never lie to me.”
“I never would, Mom. I love you.”
And we grinned at each other.
I’m not above lying to people I love, but really . . . about a fat guy with toys? Let’s save the fucking lies for when we really need them. I’m writing this in a coffee shop at an Indian casino a couple of hours out of Portland, Oregon. A very nice woman just asked me to pose for a picture with her daughter, who is in a wheelchair.
I told them, “Please forgive my eyes for being so red and runny . . . it’s the allergies, I live in the desert and all this green really gets to my eyes.” I didn’t want to say “I’m crying my eyes out while I type into my iPad about my mom and dad dying to the sound of slot machines.” I don’t only lie only about important things, I lie about allergies and frozen yogurt when the truth would be better, but, fuck, the North Pole?
My mom went into a coma a few days before New Year’s Day. While she was in her bedroom, which had been turned by the heroes of health care into a hospital room, with oxygen and morphine and magic beds to protect her paralyzed body from bedsores, she had helium balloons to watch. I don’t remember who got them for her, it might have been me, but I think it was Teller—he’s one balloon-sending motherfucker. He has those cocksucking balloon people on his speed dial. When my daughter, Mox, was in the hospital, there were plenty of balloons from Uncle Teller.
My mom couldn’t move and she needed someone to feed her, but her mind was sharper than mine ever was or ever will be. I sat by her bedside when I wasn’t doing shows and read Moby Dick to her. Not because it’s her favorite book, but because it’s my favorite book and she just wanted to hear my voice. She would watch those balloons. She watched them move in the air currents around her oxygen. Finally I put a couple of the Mylar balloons outside her window, so the cold winter Massachusetts air would whip them around. She watched those balloons for hours. In the night, they were ghostly bumping against the windows, and she watched them. What else can you do when you can’t move and you’re waiting to die?
My mom asked my sister and I if we’d do her a favor. “Now what?” I asked impatiently, to try to get a little laugh. She asked that after she died, we would let the balloons go and watch them go up into the air. “Set them free.” My mom did not believe in an afterlife; she knew we couldn’t pray for her, but her wishes were for me to do my show and for us to let the balloons go. She made me get on with my life, and she gave us a tradition. After the show in Tahoe, I flew back across the country and my sister and I met at our mom’s house. We gathered the balloons from Mom’s room and from outside. They were a bit old and funky and there wasn’t a lot of helium left. We took them out into my mom and dad’s yard, and in the middle of a cold winter’s night, we let them go. They didn’t have much lift, but the night was dark and the wind was swirling and it was moonless, so they went out of sight pretty quickly. My sister, named Valda like our mom, and I held each other and cried together.
I’m trying to make that a family tradition. Every New Year’s since my mom died, I go alone to a supermarket and buy a bunch of balloons, about ten or so, usually all one color, usually blue. Since my wife has been with me, she’s been part of letting the balloons go. Since my children have been around, I buy some extra balloons for them so they have them to play with for the rest of the day. I go outside with the balloons and I hold the balloons and I think of all the people that I love who have died. I cry. I let go of the balloons and I watch, through watery eyes, the big bunch of color fly into the sky; I watch them until they’re a single dot, and then keep watching until the dot is no more. I’ve been doing this for eleven years, and now I’m also thinking about my sister and my brother-in-law and a bunch more friends; there’s more to think about every year.
The first couple of years, our children just liked the balloons. One year they cried about the loss of the balloons. They didn’t understand that I was crying about the loss of their “auntie.” We pronounce that word the New England/African-American way, with the “aw” sound at the top. My children call my wife’s sisters “ants.” It’s two different words and labels to my children. I think last year they started to understand a little that Daddy was crying about missing his sister and his own mommy and daddy.
My mom got me through her death by making me keep working. Friends of mine who have lost a parent don’t know how to start their lives again. My mom forced me to start mine that same day. A lot of atheists have trouble figuring out how to mourn without god; my mom created the balloon tradition and focus for me. Ten years after her death, and she’s still helping me. My mom never met my children. She had the joy of grandchildren and even a great-grandchild through my sister’s kids, but my mom was forty-five when I was born, and I was fifty when Mox was born, so we skipped a generation or two there. Letting the balloons go on New Year’s Day is a way for my mom to touch my children.
When my mom died, I was writing to Linda, my high school fuck buddy, about how hard it was. It was before I had children, and Linda wrote back that it would be easier if I could also look down. She explained that we look up at our parents and down at our children. When we’re in the middle with our children below us, it’s a little easier than when we’re at the bottom just looking up with loss and sorrow.
Atheism was a real comfort to me when my parents and sister died. It feels like if I had a shred of religion it would have been impossible for me to take the pain. The idea that a powerful, vibrant, sharp woman like my mom was becoming paralyzed and dependent, that a woman who would never let anyone else even wash a dish in her house now had to be fed by people who were hired to tend to her, was horrible, unthinkable. Even when I called in showbiz favors to get neurosurgeons whom we’d done corporate shows for to look at my mom, there was no guess as to what was wrong with her. It was kinda sorta like muscular dystrophy, but it wasn’t that. It was like a lot of awful things, but it wasn’t exactly anything they knew about. She could breathe and talk and swallow, but she couldn’t move her arms and then she couldn’t move her legs. Understanding that suffering as random was hard for me, but I could never have understood suffering as part of an all-powerful god’s “plan.” If a god had planned that for my mom, I would have turned to Satan. There’s no plan I’ll get behind that includes that much suffering for anyone. Random suffering is at least comprehensible.
I’m willing for my mom and dad to live on in my memory and in parts of my DNA and the DNA of my children. I fancy I see my dad in my son’s smile and part of my mom in his eyes. My daughter moves like I’ve always thought my mom moved as a little girl. I know that I could be projecting, and that’s fine with me. It’s just another way to love above and below me.
Our family doesn’t have god and we don’t have Santa Claus. We shouldn’t lie to our children about yogurt, but we shouldn’t lie at all; still, I don’t want to lie to my children about ungulates being able to fly and the kindness of strangers who reward and punish with gifts. If I want them to dig a fat old man with white hair and a beard, I can just stop dying my hair and my lap will be there for them 365 days a year.
Our family, with our goofy names and nutty rituals, watches the balloons fly into the sky and accepts that we’ll never see them again. Emily and I explain that they’ll never meet my mommy and daddy, and they’ll never see Auntie again, but we all love them all. We love them very much.
Then we’ll have a nice dinner and open a lot of presents—you know, just like Christmas.
My mom didn’t tell us what to serve. We’ll have to figure that out for ourselves.
“Here Comes Santa Claus”
—Bob Dylan