The end of a year always brings the inevitable lists. Best books, best movies, best poetry, best songs. And corresponding lists of the worsts. Some are reminders of what I didn’t read, watch or listen to in the past 12 months. I usually fail to resist the guilt that arrives simultaneously.
Then there is the list of the people “we lost” in the previous 12 months. As my writer friend, Rick Kogan, says, “We must concern ourselves with the shadow of mortality." The lists are mostly celebrities or people of note for reasons both good and not so good. With each passing year, I find this list exponentially more difficult to digest, mostly because more and more are my age (now 74) or increasingly, younger.
I lost my baby sister in November. Madonna was 63. Cancer. Gone in a flash, really. Diagnosed in July. Dead on November 9. I saw her in October at a hospital in Chicago, days before she went home. I knew there was not going to be a happy ending, but the end, while merciful for Madonna, was and still is soul-crushing. I am the oldest of seven with three brothers and three sisters. Madonna was the sixth in birth order and the youngest of the girls. She was my closest sibling. Toward the end, she was largely stoic. She had a moment, though, when she said, “There was so much I wanted to do.”
A month later, cancer took Terry Page, one of my wife’s favorite and most beloved cousins. Nearly 30 years ago, when I showed up to ask Cathleen’s parents for permission to marry her, Terry was among the first of the cousins to welcome and embrace me, a divorced man 20 years older with four children.
Neither Madonna nor Terry will make the media lists of lives lost, but their absence weighs heavily and seems an unfair ending to 2023. And through the tears and heartache, I see not just their loss, but the losses throughout the world. From war. From famine. From disease. From accidents. From crimes. From the expiration of the physical clocks unique to each of us.
Going into the Christmas season and facing the end of the year, I felt overwhelmed and feared a downward spiral. I have found comfort from the love I feel from those who are still with me. My dear Cathleen. Our son, Vasco. Our children and grandchildren. Friends near and far.
Back in a prior life in Chicago at the Chicago Tribune, I sat in a cubicle in front of columnist Mary Schmich. We were and remain friends. She occasionally bounced ideas off me. Sometimes she solicited my opinions. Sometimes those showed up, anonymously, as something voiced by “a guy I know.”
She reminded me this year that years ago, she wrote about loss and Christmas. And it helped me to read her words once again. I share them here:
…Christmas is never just one Christmas. It is the sum of all the Christmases you've known and all the people who have inhabited them.
Perhaps more than any other day, Christmas is the measure of passing time, the collective clock by which we count out our lives. It's a mutating event anchored in unchanging rituals. New characters join any family's cast—new spouses, babies, lovers—but the old cast is still clattering around in the wings.
In my family, we usually take a moment at the Christmas meal to raise a glass and say, "To those who can't be with us."
And in that moment, they are.
And so, as 2024 looms, I will try to hold onto those words.
And be in that moment.
Maurice Possley (MoPo) is a lifelong journalist and writer who has written five non-fiction books, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and in the past decade has written narrative summaries of the wrongful conviction and ultimate exoneration of about 2,500 men and women.