Dundarave is a beautiful place at Christmas time. The whole village is like something inside of a snow globe: completely impervious and unaffected by the outside world, where all the worries and troubles of everyday life dissolve into the magic of snowflakes that never stop falling. The small beach community’s annual Festival of Lights brightens up even the darkest of December’s nights into a spectacular and blinding red carpet of lit up Christmas Trees. After you pass the trees donated by companies and corporations, you reach those that are decorated by families, by everyday people. Each one of these trees tells a story – each ornament a life souvenir. December is a month of decoration.
I think Christmas Tree Decorating is therapeutic. You dress the branches with items that represent a memorable time in your life, and you relive these times – if only for a second – as you pick up and glance at each ornament. For me, it’s an extremely wistful exercise, like replaying events that happened in another lifetime – that happened to someone else. As I dig out old artwork from elementary school, I remember snippets of being in Mrs. Barker’s Grade 1 class and learning how to use a glue gun for the first time: to glue the hat onto my snowman ornament. I find a small, miniature wreath I made out of yarn in Grade 2, when I learned how to braid. Many of our ornaments are beginnings. Happy beginnings, because we don’t want to remember and display the dark ones.

I once asked a close friend if I was spoiled for having all four of my grandparents still alive and healthy. Her reply was that I wasn’t spoiled, but blessed. On December 8th, that blessing died like a burnt out light on a Christmas tree when my grandfather was diagnosed with Stage 3 liver cancer.
Physically, my grandfather is a very frail man. Almost 83 and extremely thin, we’re told that he would not be able to survive surgery or chemotherapy – there is no treatment. He’s lived with the cancer since 2009. It’s now 2014. A beginning of the end, is what it feels like.
When I found out, I was sad. I was sad because he is my dad’s dad who raised him and supported him and moved with him and my grandma when they immigrated to Canada. Not many families stick together over distance the way mine did. I’m sad because my grandma will soon be left all alone in the new apartment they just moved into, and depends on companionship like oxygen. I’m sad because cancer killed the blessing that was supposed to be mine. But I’m not heartbroken. I’m not devastated like I would be if it were my Grandma that had received that diagnosis. I was never really close to my Grandpa: he used to take me out with my Grandma for weekly dim sums, but the whole lunch could pass by and he would literally not say one word: it was my Grandma and me who filled up all the silence. My Grandpa is an aloof and stoic man. In a way, I see a lot of him in myself. Still, I should feel a bit more than a little sadness, right? But I don’t. I wonder if that makes me a bad person.
I wonder if it makes me a bad person that I snap whenever my mom or dad tells me my Grandpa was feeling “dizzy” this morning. Or that he skipped dinner because he had “no appetite.” I tell them he’s lived with cancer for five years – just because he’s armed with the knowledge that he has it now, doesn’t mean he will have a sudden onset of all these symptoms. He shouldn’t feel any different than how he did the day before he was diagnosed. If anything, he feels dizzy with no appetite because of the psychological stress, not because of the cancer. But maybe that’s what cancer is. It’s the stress of worrying when it will take its final toll. It’s the stress of dealing with concerned family members who look at you and talk to you a little differently now. It’s the stress of having to follow up with MRIs and blood tests and urine samples and not wanting to know the results. Maybe he isn’t armed with the knowledge that he has cancer; he’s burdened with it.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I get so annoyed at everyone’s reaction is because of my own diagnosis earlier this year. I didn’t drive for almost five months after February 24th – after my car accident. I remember Andrea was the first person I really talked to about it, and the first thing she said to me after I told her was: “Congratulations.”
“Congratulations on fulfilling your rite of passage. It’s said that every driver will have one crash in his or her lifetime – I have had mine, my husband has had his, and now you have had yours. Think of yourself now as a seasoned, broken–in driver.”

Well, it did certainly leave me broken.

But not as broken as when my mom made me go to our family doctor after the accident to make sure I wasn’t injured. I wasn’t… not from the accident, at least. It happened when she asked me to bend over and she pointed at my back. Marked Scoliosis. Severe Scoliosis. Scoliosis with a 60 degree deviation. All gibberish to me at the time. Apparently, my spine has abnormal curvature that may or may not worsen as I get older. Since I’m done most of my growing, the only real treatment is surgery in which metal rods and screws would be placed in my back to align and hold my spine straight – for life. The result would be a much straighter but stiffer spine. The surgery is six hours long. Full recovery time is about a year, and that’s with minimal to no complications. The prognosis varies from case to case. I told my mom I’d talk about it later; I had math homework to do.
A later X–Ray showed the curvature to be 62 degrees, to be exact. I remember having a passive, indifferent and relaxed expression as I looked at the bones of my body on the screen, like I was viewing a painting or poster or something, anything but my X–Ray. For me, there was only one thing as bad as feeling broken: feeling crooked. And staring at that S shaped X–Ray made me feel as crooked and deformed as my spine.
“That’s nice,” I think I told my mom. I might have even smiled. “Can we go home now?”

I bet my Grandpa wishes he didn’t know he had cancer; the same way I wish I didn’t know I have scoliosis. What good is knowing, if nothing can really be done about it? I guess that’s the point where knowledge becomes a burden – when it leaves you helpless. Ever since my own diagnosis, I snap at my parents whenever they ask me how my back feels. I tell them scoliosis doesn’t develop overnight, so it feels the same way it has felt for the past 19 years of my life. Silence ensues.

We opened presents on Christmas Eve this year. We never open presents on Christmas Eve. For my entire life, my whole family would get up early on Christmas morning and meet at my aunt’s, my grandparents’, or our house and open our presents sipping coffee and tea and hot chocolate as we woke up. When I asked my parents why the change, they claim that it’s to “make it easier” on everyone on Christmas Day, so there’s less togetherness all at once. Funny, I always thought Christmas was about togetherness and being around family. As we drove in silence on that dark Wednesday night to my aunt’s house, I looked out the window up at the moon. It was a slim crescent. I thought about all the citizens of Dundarave looking up at the same moon as they decorated December with Christmas carols and menorahs and church services and holiday music at home. It gave me great sadness to realize that I wished I were a part of them, instead of heading to open presents early like it was a chore to cross off the to-do list. Charlie Brown once said that “it’s not what’s under the tree that matters, but who’s around it.” ...problem is, there won’t be anyone around our tree on Christmas morning. The thought of having an empty Christmas leaves me feeling… shattered. Being a part of my family at Christmas is something I always treasured because of our value of tradition. Maybe I was spoiled, maybe I was blessed, but either way: the blessing of tradition died from yet another new beginning that I never saw coming.  Another burnt out light on the tree – what happens when there are none left lit? Now that is heartbreaking.

Houses are dressed with rows upon rows of lights, Christmas trees can be seen in many living rooms as you drive down the road... all signs that 2014 is coming to an end. It has been my most challenging year yet, filled with transitions and readjustments and recoveries and new beginnings: both good and bad. I’ve learned the true meaning of resilience and how it takes ten times as long to put yourself back together than it does to fall apart. I may have learned how to glue a felt hat onto cardboard but I’m still learning how to fit and hold pieces of me in place. Sometimes I think identity is a fragile house of cards: a slight gust of air and the whole structure comes crashing down. Sometimes I feel like that is exactly what has happened to me and I don’t know what to make with the pile I’m left with.
This Christmas may be the last Christmas that my family has as a whole. As lost as I feel, I choose to decorate this December as fervently and as wholeheartedly as my friends in Dundarave. I choose to embrace the blessings I do have left as long as there is one light left shining on the Christmas tree. One light that shines alone is all the more noticeable than it is in an indistinguishable row of lights. Some lights may be flickering now, at risk of going dark forever at any moment, but as long as they have that glimmer of brightness, they are not dead yet, and I am still blessed. After all, even after being shoved and tossed around and left in the attic for thirteen years, my snowman’s hat still sticks on.

I almost didn’t decorate the tree this year.

Almost.