Mary Did You Know?

Great Aunt Mary used to hate this time of year.  “I don’t get what all the gifts are about – I have everything I need right here,” she’d tell me, pointing to her Virginia slim cigarettes and mini powdered donuts. “Mary!” my Uncle Auggie would say, “it’s not about what you have, it’s about giving to others.” She would shrug with a distasteful Ebeneezer look and puff on the cigarette.  But every once in a while Mary would surprise me. “Comere kid – you play Gin right? Let’s play Carmella. She has the dementia so it’s an easy win.”  My aunt Adeline once described Mary as a real-life dry heave. To her face. You can’t make this up.  We would see Mary at Sunday suppers throughout the year but never at Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day.  Mary was a nurse, an LPN, over at the Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. She worked double shifts on those days. “Someone has to,” she’d say. When I was old enough I interned there in the early 90s and I remember visiting the hospital on Christmas Day for a small holiday party for staff. Mary wasn’t there at the party. I was told she was sitting bedside with a patient up on the 8th floor of the 300 bed hospital.  Best I could see, she was holding a full house in her left hand, and holding the patient’s hand with her right.  I’m not sure I miss Mary in the way you miss the fun aunt who gets down on the floor and plays football with you and races matchbox cars, but I bet her patients miss her. She wasn’t exactly the model of compassion we talk about, but she was there. On Christmas. And I suppose as I think about it, maybe Mary was the gift.