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I was remembering a Christmas long ago, when I was five. I’d gotten a child’s record player and a kid’s record as a gift from my mother, or Santa, I no longer remember which, but it had two songs on it, just two. One side was, “All I want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth,” and the other side was, “Silent Night.” My mother had turned out all the lights in our small living room except the tree. It shone out in the dark in multi-color splendor. I remember the red bulbs most, I don’t remember if the tree had more red, or if it was simply the color that stood out to me. “Silent Night” was playing on my little record player and my mother and I were singing. I don’t remember my mother’s voice anymore, I do not know if she was a soprano, or an alto, though somewhere is a recording she made when she was a teenager of a country song she recorded on one of those places where you could pay to record yourself, long before the internet and YouTube made it so easy. I remember her voice as a teenager and it seemed lower than mine, so maybe an alto? It’s funny that I can’t bring the sound of her voice to mind, but I remember sitting in her lap, on the floor, looking up at the tree, and singing with her. I sang “Silent Night” with her in my childish soprano, I would grow up to have a pretty good vocal range from high tenor to medium high soprano, but at five I couldn’t hit the high notes. I don’t think she tried, so we sang it lower than the record, but we sang it, in the dark, with the colored lights, and her arms around me. I was so small, I fit in her lap with room to spare. She seemed tall to me then, but I know she was my height, or shorter. I’m not sure anymore, if she was 5′ 3″ like me, or 5’4″, or even 5′ 2″. I just don’t remember. I remember being small enough to fit in her lap, to be held, to feel safe, and to sing.

I am more than a decade older than my mother was when she died. By that next Christmas she would be gone, dead in August of that year. She died in a car crash, suddenly, no warning at the age of twenty-nine. Gods, twenty-nine, she never even made thirty. My next birthday I will be two decades older than she was when she died. People ask me what kind of person my mother was, but I can’t answer that question. I was six, and that means I didn’t know her as a person. She was my mother, mommy, I never even grew old enough to say, mom. I thought twenty years was enough time to get over this loss, but today I realized that I’m still angry about it. I’m still angry that I lost her. I’m still angry that she died so young. I’m still angry that she died so unhappy, because that I do remember. I have few memories of her smiling, or happy. She hated her job, but worked to support me and my grandmother. She had hopes of better things, different things, but they all vanished in the summer heat with one stop sign that another woman didn’t obey.

Does this kind of grief ever truly heal? I still dislike hearing “Silent Night”, though it took me years to remember why, and more years to acknowledge that I had the right to the sadness that came with that beautiful carol. It’s a great a song, and I had to sing it for years in choir. I never understood why it bothered me. Some day I hope to be able to raise my voice in song, and sing, “Silent Night” with all my heart, and get those high notes that I can do now, but you can’t catch the high notes when you’re crying, and I can’t hear the song without tearing up, so the highs will have to wait, until I finish working the lows.