The first Christmas with one chair empty
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 4 min read
The chair is at the end of the table, where it has been for thirty-eight Christmases, and the question in the house this year, asked by everyone and answered by no one, is whether anyone is going to sit in it.
I spent part of this December with three women in their first Christmas as widows, not by design but because that is how the year fell, and I came away with three different households and no conclusion, which I have decided to report as such rather than manufacture one.
The one who set the place
Marian set it. Plate, glass, fork on the left where he never left it, the napkin folded the way he folded it, which was wrong, a kind of crumple, and which she reproduced exactly. Her children thought it was morbid and said so, and she said that she had set that place for thirty-eight years and was not going to stop because he had, and that if it bothered them they could look at the other end of the table.
What I noticed was that the place setting made the meal easier, not harder. Nobody had to decide whether to mention him; the napkin mentioned him. Her son-in-law, who had been dreading the day, said afterward that it was the first time all month he had felt he was allowed to say the name, and he said it, several times, and so did the grandchildren, and the oldest one told a story about the crumpled napkin that nobody had heard, and that was, Marian said, the whole point, though she had not known it was the point when she folded it.
The one who went to her sister's
Joan did not host. She could not face the kitchen, she said, which was his kitchen as much as hers, he having been the one who did the turkey, and she went to her sister's in Cedar Rapids and sat at a table where he had never sat and where there was, therefore, no chair to look at.
It worked, in the sense that she got through the day. She told me afterward that she had spent most of it feeling like a guest in someone else's Christmas, which she was, and that she had felt his absence less sharply there and her own absence more; that she had not been anywhere, exactly, on the twenty-fifth, and that next year she would have to decide whether to go back to the kitchen or not, and that the decision had only been postponed, not made.
Her sister, for her part, had set the table for one fewer than usual without comment, and had put Joan where the host usually sits, at the end nearest the kitchen, which Joan did not notice until the pie and then could not stop noticing. She said she understood, on the drive home, that her sister had given her the seat you give to the person who is going to need to get up, and that it was kind, and that it was also the first time anyone had treated her as fragile, and that she did not know which of those two things to carry.
The one who cancelled it
The third woman, whom I will call Ellen because she asked me not to use her name, did not do Christmas. She told her children in November that there would be no dinner, that they should go to their in-laws, that she would see them on the twenty-seventh for pie, and that this was not a discussion.
They were upset. Her daughter cried on the phone. Ellen held the line, and on the day itself she went to the early service, came home, and spent the afternoon going through his closet, which she had been unable to do for seven months and which she did, she said, in four hours, because the house was empty and nobody was watching her face.
She does not recommend this. She said so twice. She said she could feel, on the twenty-seventh, that something had been taken from the grandchildren that they will not get back, and that she had taken it, and that she would do it again, and that both of those are true.
What I am not going to say
I am not going to say that one of these women did it right, because I sat at Marian's table and in Joan's sister's living room and on Ellen's porch on the twenty-seventh, and all three were grieving in a way that fit the shape of the woman, and I do not think a widow in her first December needs a magazine to tell her which shape to be.
"Everybody wanted to know what I was going to do about the chair," Marian said. "Nobody asked what I was going to do about the rest of the year."
That is the question I would have liked to put to all three, and did not, because it was December and they had done enough. I suspect the chair is the easy part. The chair is one day. The rest of the year does not have a napkin in it.