Blog: On remembering family during Hawaii’s holiday season

In the interest of telling the truth, I must confess that I am not at all surprised by the chorus of sirens from fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers I’ve been hearing recently from my home office overlooking Downtown. It’s the holidays.

I must also confess that I feel a genuine sense of relief that I can be fairly certain that none of those sirens is of any real concern to me. Both of my parents are now gone, and their passing was for me and my two sisters the end of the world. When my parents became terminally sick, which as it happens was during the holiday seasons of 2006 and 2008, every siren was, in my mind, crying out the fact that the most important people in my world were on their way out. It could very well have been Ma in there, or my Pa to whom paramedics were speeding. I thank God that nightmare is over, that Ma and Pa are no longer suffering.

Those dark days lasted longer than I care to recall or admit. When my Ma went, it was at home, in bed with Willie, who remains our beloved family dog, at her side. My older sister suffered the ordeal of finding Ma after her passing. I arrived soon after. A lifelong Mama’s boy, I wailed and I wailed. I calmed down after what still seems like an eternity and asked my Pa, “Is it wrong to be relieved?”

He held my sopping face in his hands and, at 36 years old, I felt like a child. Pa looked as deep into my eyes as anyone ever will and he said, “No.”

Pa went two years to the day after Ma’s funeral. It was no less traumatic, but my sisters and I faced his passing with a grim resignation that can only be known by those who’ve suffered similar loss. Both of my folks went in the spring, as far from the holiday season they both so loved and cheerfully celebrated as is possible.

So now, when a siren wails at three in the morning in November and December, I empathize with whomever may be on the other end of it. I hope for the best for them, truly. I am thankful for those who were there for my family as the pall of my parents’ mortality drew down during the holidays, inevitable and unimaginably terrible.

I am grateful for the fact that I will continue to be with family during the holidays, although the vast majority of that family is “calabash” and in-laws. My mother’s tradition of holiday hospitality largess lives on in my sisters and aunties, and my father’s tradition of warmth and of maddening frustration with stringing Christmas lights live on in me. I find the closeness I knew then in my wife’s family now.

It’s hard to face real sorrow and leaden grief, but it does make it easier to find real joy in simple things like a family together for the holidays. Enjoy yours. Cheers.