The Christmas To Forget

 “I’m really looking forward to seeing Maggie again,” I told my husband as I settled into the passenger’s seat for the long drive from New Jersey to South Carolina. Work had been hectic that year, and we were both excited about the prospect of having a relaxing Christmas weekend with our friend at a seaside bed and breakfast in South Carolina.

 “I’m looking forward to the breakfast pie,” he said.

 We both laughed, remembering how delicious all the food was at this B&B. That was one of the reasons we’d decided to spend Christmas there, knowing that the casual ambience, the beautiful setting and, yes, the delicious food, would appeal to Maggie as much as it had to us.

 Though she was at least twenty-five years our senior, neither of us thought of Maggie as old. With her wonderful sense of humor and her zest for life, not to mention her love of travel, she was one of our favorite companions, which was the reason that even though we lived hundreds of miles apart, we would arrange to meet her at least once a year. We’d had rendezvous in places as diverse as the Smoky Mountains, downtown Atlanta and Stowe, Vermont. We’d even considered a Christmas celebration in the Canadian Rockies, but when that was too far for Maggie to travel, we chose a place closer to her home.

 Unfortunately, getting to South Carolina wasn’t as much fun as we’d expected. There was heavier than normal traffic on I-95, and then it started to snow. While most of the country dreamed of a white Christmas, we’d been hoping for warmer temperatures and a chance to walk on the beach. The snow stopped once we passed Washington, but by then we were already five hours later than we’d planned to be.

 “Do you suppose Maggie will be waiting up for us?” I asked.

 My husband shook his head. “You told her we weren’t sure when we’d arrive, so I imagine she’s fast asleep.”

 But she wasn’t. When we checked in, the innkeeper told us that she had specifically asked us to call once we arrived, so I did.

 “Y’all have a lot of nerve coming so late,” she announced when she picked up the phone. When I explained about the snow and the traffic, she scoffed. “It seems to me you didn’t try very hard to get here on time. If you cared about me, you’d have been here for supper.”

 I hung up the phone, shocked. Not only had we not discussed having supper together, but never in the fifteen years that we’d known Maggie had she been anything other than a true lady, polite even when faced with unpleasant circumstances, yet here she was, practically berating us.

 “Are you sure you had the right room?” my husband asked when I told him what she’d said.

 “Yes. There’s no mistaking Maggie’s voice.”

 The next morning, despite the appeal of the breakfast pie, I was reluctant to go to breakfast, wondering what Maggie would say. Instead of the sarcastic woman I dreaded, we found the “old” Maggie – charming and welcoming. I dismissed her rudeness of the previous night, rationalizing that she had been tired and worried.

 But as the hours passed, I noticed that Maggie kept asking the same questions only a minute or two after we’d answered them. And then it took her twenty minutes to retrieve her purse from her room, almost as if she’d forgotten why she’d gone back to the room.

 “What do you think is wrong?” I asked.

 “Fatigue,” was my husband’s answer. “She’s not as young as she used to be.”

 It sounded logical. But when Maggie drove us to a nearby restaurant for supper and stopped at green lights, then tried to drive through red ones, we could no longer blame it on fatigue. And yet, we’d no sooner think that something was amiss than she’d revert to the woman we’d known and loved for so long. At times like that, it was easy to ignore the occasional bursts of hostility and the way she continued to get lost on the short walk from the lobby to her hotel room, no matter how often she’d taken the same route.

 “Just one more day,” I said when we woke on Christmas morning.

 Instead of basking in the feelings of peace and joy that that blessed day normally evoked, we were as exhausted as we’d been on the drive south, simply because of what felt like a roller coaster ride with Maggie. The relaxing weekend we’d hoped for had turned out to be anything but.

 “What do you think is wrong?” we asked each other as we headed back home the next day. After three days of Maggie’s erratic behavior, we had no doubt that something was seriously wrong. Unfortunately, neither of us had a good answer to the question of what it might be. Though we knew she needed help, we weren’t sure how to get it for her, since she had no family or close friends still living. We considered calling her minister, but she was so prickly that we were afraid she’d resent our intervention.

In the end, we did nothing more than tell each other that the next time Maggie suggested a get-together, we’d find an excuse not to meet her. She and I spoke once over the phone, but that conversation was so unsatisfactory that I didn’t call again, because I didn’t want a reminder of what my husband and I were calling “the Christmas to forget.”

 As much as possible, I managed to put the whole trip behind me. But three years later when my mother started exhibiting the same characteristics we’d seen in Maggie, I realized I’d been given a priceless gift that Christmas: the gift of understanding. Having seen the symptoms once, it was easier to recognize them in my mother and to identify them as the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

 While my siblings were in denial, I wasn’t, simply because of my Christmas with Maggie. And when Mother’s friends stopped visiting her, causing my sisters to wonder what kind of friends they were, I could not blame them. You see, I’d behaved the same way to Maggie that Mother’s friends had toward her. I understood them. And I understood one other thing – that that understanding had been a gift from God on “the Christmas to forget.”