By The Pie Safe, With Care

Dear Rachel,

Your stocking was hung with care, but not “by the chimney,” as the old poem has it. Actually, it was hung with care, and love, and with more than a few tears.

As always, we hung all the stockings—yours, mine, Lesley’s, and Amy’s—not by a chimney or on a mantel, but on an antique pie safe in the dining room. We’re nothing if not traditional, you know.

Your stocking is small and beautiful and elegant—it’s much like you, in fact. (Mine is huge and old and all stretched out of shape, so I’m not sure what that says.) Your stocking is also sadly, devastatingly, empty this year and it will remain empty this year and every year from now on.

I don’t know how to take that, how to handle the painful welter of emotions that batter and buffet me when I glance over and see that stocking hanging there limp and unfilled. I’m not sure that I would have put it out this year, but Lesley felt it would be best. Either way, of course, we lose—have lost, in fact—what we held dearest in all the world.

Not to put the stocking out would somehow be a repudiation of you and of all you accomplished, of all the love you gave to us and in turn received from us. How could we ignore you? How could we pretend that you simply never existed?

But letting it hang there empty amongst the others reminds me so shockingly, so brutally, of our loss.

Ah, but what should a Jewish kid from Chicago care about Christmas, anyway? That’s what I keep telling myself, but it doesn’t work, of course.

Love,

Dad