200: When is a Gift More than a Gift?

Allison Langer  0:01  
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Happy Hanukkah and Happy Hanukkah. Yeah, they're on the same time.

Justina Shandler  0:13  
Holy that's never happened, Billy, I feel like it has. Are you sure? No,

Andrea Askowitz  0:18  
all right, but Okay, today we bring you a repeat of one of our favorite stories ever, and is also a Christmas story. It's a sad story and a beautiful story, and ultimately hopeful. We hope you'll enjoy it. Thanks

Allison Langer  0:34  
for listening, and we'll look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Andrea Askowitz  0:38  
See you next year. You

Justina Shandler  0:49  
her, here's New Beginnings.

Be a queen, not a pawn.

Allison Langer  0:56  
I'm Andrea askowitz. I'm Allison Langer, and this is writing class radio, you'll hear true personal stories and learn how to write your own stories together. We produce this podcast, which is equal parts heart and art. By heart, we mean the truth in a story. By art, we mean the craft of writing. No matter what's going on in our lives. Writing class is where we tell the truth. It's where we work out our shit. There's no place in the world like writing class, and we want to bring you in

Andrea Askowitz  1:26  
today on our show, we bring you a Christmas Story by Emily Henderson. Emily is one of our students, and she workshopped this story in class, and then she got it published in the Huffington Post on december 25 2021 the story is an excellent example of using an object to convey emotion. It's also a great example of using details that tell so much and also telling Emily tells us how she's feeling. The entire story. More. Emily Henderson can be heard on Episode 103 writing the same story over and over. Emily Henderson is a runner and writer living in Santa Barbara, California. Her essays have appeared in scary mommy, the Santa Barbara independent Huffington Post and writing class radio. We'll be back with Emily story after the break,

Allison Langer  2:20  
we're back. I'm Allison Langer, and this is writing class radio. Here's Emily Henderson reading her story titled after our son died, my husband gave me the most meaningful Christmas gift of my life.

Emily Henderson  2:41  
Last Christmas, I sat on the floor surrounded by wrapping paper, new toys and happy kids. Then seven and nine, it was like being in a bubble bath with too much soap, ribbons and bows flying as each new box was ripped open, it quickly became hard to tell what was a gift and what was trash the previous year, our 20 month old son, Aiden, died unexpectedly during surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. It was our second Christmas without him, and I was still getting used to shopping for two kids instead of three. I think it's mom's turn to open her stocking. My husband said, My daughter brought it over to me, exaggerating her movements as she walked on her knees. I pulled the first thing out of my stocking, a plastic round button like the kind you'd hit if you were on a game show. These are called easy buttons. Usually they're bright red with white letters that spell out easy. They became popular in 2005 when staples began promoting and selling them. The idea was that you could solve your problem just by hitting this button. The one in my stocking looked like a knockoff. It was just plain white with a black base. I looked up at my husband from the floor with one eyebrow raised in confusion and annoyance, is this for me? I asked press it? He replied. I hadn't noticed before, but the kids were watching me closely, waiting for me to press the button too. I pressed it, and the room filled with sound. There were muffled voices, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to hear. Then I heard a high pitched squeal that turned into a laugh. The room blurred, and when I raised my head to look at Nick, gravity took the tears from my eyes and pulled them down my cheeks. It was Aiden playing with his siblings in the recording, my daughter says hello, and my older son says, oh no, oh no. And then there's one more loud belly laugh from Aiden. The sound stopped abruptly as it had began, and the room was quiet. Nick broke the silence. The recording is 15 seconds, so if you want to change it, you. Can it's perfect. I said, Nick, and the two kids looked up proud, and I realized they must have picked out the recording together. I put the easy button on my desk and didn't think of it much until my best friend Ashley asked me to watch her toddler. Will she was having another baby and needed someone she trusted to care for him while she recovered in the hospital. There was never a question as to whether we would take will Nick and I are baby people, and toddlers are our specialty. We knew it would be hard, but I thought having a toddler in the house again might be what we needed at this stage in our grief. I wasn't sure if this is something you'd be ready for. Ashley said, we can't wait. I told her, Aiden's crib was still in our bedroom. Removed it from his room after he got sick, and now it's been in our room longer than Aiden was alive. The crib had become a shrine overflowing with blankets and stuffed animals and trinkets from his life to make room for will, I piled everything in the crib into a corner, careful not to break the plaster mold of Aiden's hand or misplaced the plastic bags with clippings of his hair. Then I cleared off my desk. I stacked my books, laptop and favorite pens in the living room. I put the easy button on top. Will is the same age as Aiden was when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. That first night, I listened to will speak half words and watched him take half steps, and for a moment, I couldn't tell who was who he was doing all the things Aiden was doing before cancer made his smile crooked and his blond curls fall out. My daughter was fully prepared to play mom, and almost started crying when I told her she wouldn't be the one to rock will to sleep at night. My older son was more reserved. More than once I heard him say, that's just like Aiden, his voice trailing off, maybe lost in the memory, maybe not wanting to remember fully. The next day, I asked my older son, how are you feeling about having will here, is it hard for you? He paused considering the question, no. I mean, it's hard, but in a good way. I'm embarrassed by the part of me that wanted him to be upset so we could cry together about how unfair it all is. Instead, my 10 year old made me feel better about things being sad and feeling joy at the same time. The next night, Will was crawling around my pile of things in the living room, and he picked up the easy button. I wanted him to press it. This felt like a big moment in our family, and I wanted Aiden to be part of it. He pressed it, but instead of letting it play all the way through, he kept pressing it and pressing it. So what came out were stops and starts of Aiden laughing. Nick and I smiled at each other from across the room. Throughout the week, I prepared bottles and cut chicken nuggets and strawberries into tiny bites. We sang songs and read books, and I remembered what it was like to look forward to nap time. By the end of the week, we were worn out but satisfied. My friend came to pick up will, and I witnessed him meeting his baby brother for the first time, and my heart was so full. We did it. We spent a week with a living, breathing, exhausting, adorable reminder of our grief, and we survived. I'd say we even had fun, but grief is a sneaky fellow. I had gotten used to seeing bibs, bottles and hooded towels that look like dragons. I fell into the habit of scanning the floor for choking hazards and a crawling baby boy and matching pajamas, and now they were all gone again, and the house was quiet. It was a familiar feeling after Aiden died, the older kids returned to school and Nick returned to work, and it was just me in the house. I wandered from room to room, looking for what I knew I wouldn't find. Decades before I was born, my mother's brother died in a tragic accident when he was four years old. I remember one sepia toned picture of him on my grandmother's dresser. No one ever talked about him, and I got the impression I shouldn't ask. My grandparents came of age during the Depression. They are part of the greatest generation, but they are also from a time when many people pushed grief into a dark corner and rarely spoke of it. I, on the other hand, had the instinct to keep my grief front and center, I placed bits and pieces of Aden everywhere, so I only had to turn my head a little to be reminded of him. There were pictures all over the house, a pair of socks and the trunk of my car and the poster my friend made for his funeral leaning against the wall in the living room. It was mid November when Aiden died. The start of the holiday season also marks the start of the morning season, a time for gathering around the table that will always have one high chair empty, one fewer letter to Santa, one more turn of the New Year Without our son, our family will never stop grieving, but how that grief expresses itself will change. The things that bring me comfort will evolve. The crib I wasn't ready to take down before is now stacked in pieces in the rafters of our garage. I still catch my daughter playing with Aiden's toys, but I know eventually the time will come to donate them. Next year, we are remodeling our house, and I imagine I will have plenty of opportunities to decide what to display, what to pack away and what to let go, a sort of Marie Kondo process for grief, never rushed, never forced, never because it's something I think I should do before my family gave me that easy button, I would have called it a useless gift, but it turned out to be one of my most prized possessions. It brings me comfort. It keeps my grief close, keeps Aiden close. As I move through these phases, I use it when I need a smile or a cry or when I want to wallow in anger. It's a beautiful reminder. It helps me not to forget not just Aiden, but the love we all shared, that love hasn't gone anywhere. I can still feel it, and celebrating Aiden's life and remembering the joy he brought us will keep that love alive. I press the button to remind myself that what we've been through isn't easy, but in a good way.

Allison Langer  11:49  
Wow. I mean this just obviously, this hits me in a really, really familiar place. So it's emotional for me to hear every single time I've heard it read. It just really gets me.

Andrea Askowitz  12:01  
Well, it gets me too. I mean, it's so sad, but sad without being like, overly melodramatic. It's just real hard, hard hitting, just really good. She

Allison Langer  12:13  
has such a way of bringing us into her life and her story, and we feel the love and we feel the pain, and I think that's such a talent, like every detail she gave us, example, it moved the story along in a in such a good way. And I really kept reading and reading and reading like I never got bored. I was every last detail there's packed with details. Her details

Andrea Askowitz  12:35  
are excellent. I mean, right from the beginning, I wrote great details as a note like she was, she talked about the plaster mold of Aiden's hand and like the little bag of hair. So the things that she was moving to make way for will to come. One thing that I thought was so great was the use of the easy button. Like the easy button never stop being center of the story. Even though the story is about so much more than this easy button, I actually think the story is about how to grieve. And I got to that at the very end, when she brought in the part about decades before her grandparents and how they dealt with grief, which was to not talk about it, but she had the instinct to keep grief front and center that part, like sort of took me out for a second. I was like, Wait, why is she going back in time? Because I was so engaged at what was happening right now. But I think that's why. And now I remember that Noah Michaelson of Huffington Post, he wanted that he always edits a story or pushes a story to be about something like much bigger than just the actual situation that's happening to the narrator. And I think in that moment, he wanted Emily to sort of tell a story about how to grieve, how she grieves, and

Allison Langer  13:57  
what it feels like to grieve. Yeah, because I think a lot of people feel like, okay, well, why aren't you moving on? And she mentions here, like, it's not that she's gonna Maria Kondo, but at her own pace, because there really isn't a pace. And I mean, I know that from we were on the phone just the other day. It's been 14 years since my daughter died, and a, you know, emergency vehicle went by, and I was like, hold on a minute. I just need to focus for a second. And it just it, you know, it brings it up. Sorry, I'm getting emotional, but the holidays are tough, but it does, I mean, these things trigger us, and all of a sudden you're right back there. And part of it feels really good, because you can feel that person's presence in such a big way where you don't necessarily feel it on a daily basis all these years later, you know? So it's immediately like you feel the pain, but the pain is almost a good reminder that that person is still in your heart. The connection, yeah. Yeah, and this easy button, it just does that every time. Yeah,

Andrea Askowitz  15:04  
excellent, yeah. Ah, shit. It's like, it's, I think this is the story is just so well written. The other part that I that I was struck by this time is that there's kind of, like, two situations happening. One is she gets the easy button, and two, another kid comes to stay at their house, but she and I think it's because she keeps the easy button like we're following the easy button throughout the whole thing. She keeps those two stories together, like they work together. And I think we kind of get caught up in like, well, the story needs to be about only one thing, but sometimes, if you're good, you can bring in more than one element. And Emily Hunter Sam, is that good? Well,

Allison Langer  15:55  
we've talked about bringing in objects. And so this object, the way it was, it was not only a physical object, it was it the audio as well, and then it became emotional. I guess most objects can are still going to be emotional. That's the whole point of Maria Kondo. It's like, is it? Is it making you feel some way should you get rid of it? Like that whole concept, which

Andrea Askowitz  16:20  
is also a literary concept that we've talked about before, the object correlative, which really just means, like object, object standing in for an emotion. Yeah,

Allison Langer  16:29  
so it's not just on the outskirts. It's in the story, in every single element she brings in. It's just so beautifully woven. I mean, it's hard to it's hard to have a story work

Andrea Askowitz  16:40  
this perfectly. I know, excellent. Why is it hard? A

Allison Langer  16:43  
lot of times it's contrived. It doesn't happen this way, like, oh, I should have busted out the easy button, but I didn't. It was hidden, you know, like it wasn't, he didn't touch it, but could he have touched it? Like we, you know, we try to bring in elements of a story that didn't exist. But in this case, it did exist, and she's just writing about the details, but she also includes so much emotion. You know how we're always talking about, like, well, they gave us all the details, but how did you feel about that? She she does that, not overly, but just enough.

Andrea Askowitz  17:10  
I don't know how she did it, but I felt it. I did. There was one thing that I wanted to also to mention, because you and I were talking about this the other day, uh, what? What is a call back, and he or she did it. And I want to show you, when she's asking her son, the older son, how he felt. How was it having will here? And I think the the other son said something like, it was hard, but in a good way, because then at the very end, she used that language, yeah, the easy, buy and get it. It isn't easy, but in a good way, and we know that that's something she learned from her son. Loved the story so much. She also wasn't Pollyanna about having will there she said, because in this line where she said, what it was like to look forward to nap time, because having a toddler is not easy for anybody that was cool. So

Allison Langer  18:03  
pretty much at every end of whatever she's trying to say, she adds the emotion, and that is super, super important, and that's where people don't people who are omitting that are, yeah, they're missing that beautiful thought bubble that you don't get in movies. You're getting it in writing. You're getting it in this in podcasts and stories and all that stuff. So that's the beauty of

Andrea Askowitz  18:24  
emotion. Excellent. So well done.

Allison Langer  18:28  
And Emily's amazing. She's always writing. She's now wanting to write a book. At the time, this was run in the Huffington Post. This was published. She was thinking about writing a book about running every street in her city, and now maybe that's part of the memoir she's doing, but she's gonna, she's writing a memoir about this whole process of dealing with grief, with her son and his illness, so I can't wait to

Andrea Askowitz  18:52  
read it. Did you say, Yeah? You said that she was in your class, right? Yeah, she's

Allison Langer  18:56  
in my second draft writers group, and then we're gonna turn that into a memoir writing group. So that's gonna all the people in there want to write memoirs. So we're just gonna go ahead and turn that into it, starting in January. And

Andrea Askowitz  19:07  
this story was originally published in Huffington Post, December, 25 2021

Allison Langer  19:19  
here's New Beginnings. Thank you for listening and thank you Emily for sharing your story. Writing class. Radio is hosted by me, Allison Langer and me Andrea askwitz. Audio production by Matt Kendall, Evan serminsky and Aiden glassy at the sound off media company. Theme music is by Justina Shandler. There's more writing class on our website, including stories we study, editing resources, video classes, writing retreats and live online classes. If you want to write with us every week, or if you're a business owner, community activist group that needs healing an entrepreneur and you want to help your team write better, check out all the classes we offer on our website, writing class, radio.com join our community. We come together for instruction and excuse to write in the support from other writers to learn more, go to our website or patreon.com/writing

Andrea Askowitz  20:09  
class. Radio, starting in 2025 a new episode will drop the first Wednesday of the month. There's no better way to understand ourselves and each other than by writing and sharing our stories. Everyone has a story. What's yours?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  20:36  
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