The 13th Gift Page 16

  I am warmed by the idea that someone helped them survive it, just as they had helped us. I imagine the legacy of the gift givers stretching back over centuries to the very origin of the song and beyond.

  Next year, it will be our turn to sing, our turn to carry on this tradition of kindness and giving.

  Perhaps it’s the scent of the cinnamon rolls that wakes my children. I’d like to think it part of our Christmas miracle that they appear at that moment. I can feel the tears pricking my eyes as I hug them each, but today they are tears of joy. I lead them to the table and show them our beautiful little tree.

  “I want to tell you the story of the thirteenth gift,” I say.

  They gather around me and listen.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The 13th Gift

  THE MAGIC OF that Christmas stays with us today, many years later. Retelling the tale of the thirteen gifts is as much a part of our family tradition as trimming the tree.

  Seated around the dining room table that morning in 1999, Ben, Nick, Megan, and I had committed our lives to carrying forward the lessons of our gift givers, but in our own special way.

  Everyday can be Christmas. Megan came up with that motto.

  I never stopped searching for the identity of the gift givers whose kindness helped my family to heal. They had given us new memories and a very special holiday tradition, but I still felt stuck, unable to fully move on without knowing who they were.

  I needed to thank them.

  I had long suspected my sister-in-law Dorothy knew more about this mystery than she let on. Could she and David have deposited the tree with twelve brass bells on the back deck, while all eyes were focused on the front of the house?

  Over the years, I had questioned Dorothy, but she declared her ignorance time and again.

  At a family gathering in the summer of 2013, I asked her one more time. I told her my desire to share our story so others could learn the lessons that had so benefited us. When she tried to change the subject, I didn’t let up like I usually do. I couldn’t.

  With her elbows on the picnic table and her face in her hands, she obviously was conflicted. I could also tell she knew the truth.

  “Please,” I said. “I need to meet them.”

  She took a deep breath, and then, she surprised me.

  “I’ll ask them if it’s okay,” she said.

  I did a little happy dance there under the awning, surrounded by submarine sandwiches, birthday cake, and family.

  “This means so much to me,” I said.

  We cried together that day, but just a little. I didn’t know who our gift givers were—yet—but my arms were extended, and the golden rings were finally within reach again. I felt giddy and nervous, but hopeful that these generous friends would grant my wish.

  A few weeks later, I got a brief telephone message at work from Dorothy.

  Our true friends now had names: Susan and George Armstrong of Kettering, a community not far from where we lived in Bellbrook. They had lived only a few miles away all these years. Had we passed each other in checkout lanes, met at the gas pumps, dined in the same restaurants? I saw their goodness in everyone I met.

  With their identity revealed, I couldn’t wait to see their faces.

  On a sunny Saturday in March 2014, Nick and I met them face to face to share a cup of coffee and conversation. Sweet, kind, generous, and funny, they are treasures. Susan is a retired social worker, and George, a retired high school art teacher. Now in their midsixties, the couple has played Secret Santa to twenty-two grieving families, with help from their children: Noah, Zachary, and Natalie. Our family was the ninth to benefit from their healing generosity. In recent years their grandson Jackson also has joined their elf pack.

  “Why us?” I asked.

  Susan told me that she and my sister-in-law have been lifelong friends. She had known Rick’s family since he was a skinny second grader.

  “I just remember him as this cute little kid running around the yard,” Susan said. “When we heard that he had died, we decided right away that we wanted to do this for his family.”

  “We couldn’t believe someone so vivacious could be gone,” George added.

  The images Nick and Megan conjured of the gift givers having ninja skills weren’t far off the mark. While Susan or George drove the getaway car, their kids dressed as ninjas or G.I. Joes, running across lawns, jumping fences, sometimes crawling on their bellies to avoid detection. Their parents would wait up the street with the car motor running and doors open so their children could jump in quickly.

  It was their daughter Natalie, then age seven, whose face I saw smiling up at me through the window of Nick’s bedroom right before I fell. We didn’t find our twelfth gift until Christmas morning, but Zachary had deposited it on the back deck the night before. Our lookouts had made his job difficult.

  “He had to cut across yards and sneak around the back of the house,” George said. “It seemed like we waited forever for him.”

  As for the clues on the cards we tried so hard to decipher, there weren’t any, only healing words.

  “How did you know exactly what we needed?” I asked.

  That is when Susie told me that their tradition of holiday gift giving had begun as a way to honor the short life of a baby daughter and sibling, Andrea Erin Armstrong.

  “I woke up feeling funny, like I wasn’t pregnant anymore, even though I was due in two weeks,” Susan told me. “A good friend was going to have a baby shower for me that day, but I knew something wasn’t right.”

  Susan delivered Andrea on September 29, 1989, stillborn. Andrea would have been twenty-five in 2014, the same age as my Megan.

  “I still think about her every day,” her mom said.

  Christmas hit the Armstrong family hard that year, just as it did us after Rick passed away. Then, thirteen days before the holiday, a poinsettia mysteriously appeared at their home.

  Small gifts followed for twelve days, each with a card echoing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” song. Noah was nine years old that Christmas, and Zachary, five. Their reaction to the gifts was similar to Ben, Nick, and Megan’s.

  “I’d be feeling low, and then a gift would come and it would take my mind off our loss for a while,” Susan said. “It was day three or four before we realized this was going to go on for some time.”

  The joy the gifts brought to the family extended beyond the holidays. The next year, as a tribute to baby Andrea, Susan and George decided to play Secret Santa themselves following the tradition set by their true friends. Originally, the couple selected families who had lost infants as they had. They expanded their giving to include other losses because they saw the need. The tradition for Andrea continues.

  “Her life was short, but we learned so much from her. We wanted her life to make a difference,” Susan told me over coffee.

  As parents, we teach our kids to walk and talk, ride bikes, play games. The Armstrongs passed on to their children a legacy of goodness and giving. What an amazing heirloom.

  “They were all I could ever have imagined and more,” Nick said, after meeting the couple.

  Most of the families that they visited never learned the identity of their true friends. I feel lucky to shake their hands and say thank you. I also wanted to know why the secrecy was so important to their giving.

  “The premise was always to take away the pain. We hoped the mystery would provide some relief, especially if there were children involved,” Susan said. “We didn’t want people to know it was us. This wasn’t about us. It was about the families and the devastating loss they were facing.”

  Nick and I drove away from the meeting with George and Susan smiling and energized, but with one nagging question. The members of the Armstrong family were second-generation gift givers. Now, we wanted to know who started the tradition.

  “We would never have thought to do this on our own,” Susan had said.

  It had taken me thirteen years to track down our gift givers
. The trail of clues leading to the Armstrongs’ true friends dated back to 1989. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I should be satisfied knowing the ending of our story. But it did matter.

  Once again, the Armstrongs guided me.

  Though they didn’t realize it until the twelfth day, the Armstrongs had known their gift givers. All those years ago, when Susan had sought answers after Andrea’s death, she had left a message on a perinatal helpline at Miami Valley Hospital.

  An expert in grieving had called her back, and the two women became friends.

  Sue Hundt wasn’t then college trained in counseling or psychology, but she had been one of the first volunteers to answer the helpline when the hospital launched the service in 1987. She and husband Ron were well-known at the hospital after eight pregnancies, including two sets of twin boys.

  Only two of their children had survived.

  “You don’t have any training for grief. It just happens, so you’ve got to feel your way,” Ron said. “We felt we had a strong story to tell, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are ways to survive that awful moment.”

  It was Ron, a city planner and artist, who came up with the concept to use “The Twelve Days of Christmas” carol. He is Santa Claus. The Hundts began their annual Twelve Days of Christmas tradition in 1988, and they have never missed a season.

  Today, their family includes son Adam, adopted daughter Marilee, and Mollee. As with the Armstrongs, the Hundt children are all veterans in the Secret Santa tradition.

  “So many people helped us grieve after the loss of our twins; they helped us exorcise the demons,” Ron said. “We wanted to find a way to give back.”

  From their own experiences, the couple knew that healing took time; one gift wouldn’t be enough.

  “We liked the song. We wanted to do something that was drawn out, but simple, that could involve their kids if we could,” Sue said. “Part of the fun has been parking the car up the street and waiting to see them open the door and find the gift.”

  Now a special needs teacher, Sue was a stay-at-home mom and babysitter in the early years of their giving. Money was tight. She worried about the cost, but Ron reassured her that the gifts didn’t have to be expensive.

  “The gifts didn’t have to be big. It was mostly, what do they need?”

  These true friends begin looking in January for a family to visit when the holiday season rolls around. Their church community, coworkers, and the perinatal helpline where Sue still is a volunteer have helped them identify families who have suffered a loss or just need a hand.

  The Hundts tailor their gifts to meet the specific needs of each family, such as food, diapers, and toys. On the eleventh day, they leave a Nativity set. The baby Jesus figurine comes on Christmas Eve, when they always reveal themselves.

  “This is how I can say our children’s lives helped someone else,” Sue said.

  This Christmas Eve I will gather my grandchildren around me, Ben’s Gavin and Gracelynne. In the glow of the tree lights, I will retell the story of the thirteen gifts and show them the homemade cards. Ben, Nick, and Megan will join in the tale, as they always do, embellishing each of our exploits, especially mine. This year, for the first time, the story will have a proper ending.

  Meeting these two couples was a blessing. There were no awkward moments. We were friends after all, even before we met. I had always imagined them as superheroes. Learning they, too, had been vulnerable only strengthens that image of them in my mind.

  I have walked away from our encounters touched by their happiness. These couples sought new ways to make the holidays matter despite their own heartbreak. Through them, I learned how to celebrate the season while keeping Rick’s memory close. The power of their gifts lies in the understanding that joy and sorrow can coexist comfortably and without guilt.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if their joy in life had been rooted in their good deeds. Recognition for their actions had never been part of their mind-set. Call it giving back or paying it forward, they had taken the kindness shown to them by others as a challenge to live a worthy life.

  They have more than met it.

  Now it is our turn to try.

  We don’t all have to become gift givers dashing across darkened lawns in ninja outfits to experience the high that living a generous life can bring. But even in moments of deepest grief, we can turn off self-survival mode and share with others all that we’ve learned along the way.

  Folks have asked me over the years if my children and I became gift givers. I tell them we remain inspired by our true friends, but I leave that mystery for others to solve.

  Then, I lure them into a conversation.

  I tell them one of the greatest gifts we all possess is the ability to give. Wealth isn’t a prerequisite; compassion and a kind heart are all you need. What better way to honor our loved ones, past and present, than to reach out and change a life for the better? And, the holidays are a perfect time to look outside of ourselves and be a true friend. A legacy of generosity can create memories that reverberate beyond the moment and outshine the brightest of heirloom ornaments.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began many years ago in the pages of my journal, where I felt free to share every dark moment and fear. It took encouragement and support from family members and friends to bring it to life.

  Thanks to everyone who helped me through those early difficult times as I struggled to stand on my own as a single parent. Tom and Charlotte, David and Dorothy, Ron and Mary, you guys are the best. To my sisters Carol and Lori, who began supplying me with notebooks and pencils in grade school, you will always be remembered and missed.

  My gratitude and love go out to Kate, who coerced me back into college, gave me my first computer, and remains my greatest teacher and friend.

  Many thanks to the members of the Key Lime Writers’ Group, Janet, Rosalie, and Mary Lou, who dried my tears as I began writing raw with grief. Their gentle prodding and continual feedback compelled me to the keyboard from first chapter to last.

  To my former coworker Margo, thank you for listening to me as I worked through this story out loud and then on paper. You had the courage to tell me when I was moving in a wrong direction both with the book and in life; I know it takes a dear friend to do that.

  To my agent Hannah Brown Gordon of Foundry Literary & Media: thank you so much for believing in this book. And to Kirsten Neuhaus: thank you for helping to find wonderful homes for this book around the world. To my supporters at Harmony Books, including publisher Tina Constable, editorial director Diana Baroni, publicist Lauren Cook, marketing director Meredith McGinnis, and all of the sales, production, and promotion teams—I really appreciate your early enthusiasm about what this book could be and now is. To my editor, Leah Miller: you made this writing journey feel effortless, and I am grateful. I also send a huge thanks to the editors and reporters at the Dayton Daily News, who pushed me to dig for details, write lean, and tell the truth.

  To the Antioch Writers’ Workshop, where I found my voice and learned to write creatively, thank you for providing me with opportunities to develop through your workfellow program. Lessons I have gleaned there fill every page of this book.

  To my beloved Rick, Ben, Nick, and Megan, along with my grandchildren Gavin and Gracelynne and their mom, Cynthia, thank you for giving me reasons to rejoice in life every day.

  Finally, I send out a prayer of hope and gratitude for gift givers everywhere. Your generosity of spirit fuels us all forward.

  Joanne Huist Smith

  Dayton, Ohio

  April 9, 2014

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joanne Huist Smith is a native of Dayton, Ohio. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Wright State University and worked as a reporter for the Dayton Daily News. She is the mother of three and grandmother of two.