A lifetime of giving

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that makes a person,” said young Angus McCullough as he stood before the draped casket of his girlfriend, Elizabeth. The crowd was packed together in the bright chapel—too many young people in somber clothing, with drawn faces. We seemed to hold a collective breath in anticipation. Could this stricken young boy lighten our grief, enlighten our dark thoughts?

“The physical body is one thing,” said Angus, “and then the soul... but it is the sum of all the interactions we have with other people... the parts of ourselves we share and that others hold onto... that make the person we are.”

In that moment, this young man, barely full-bearded, made more sense of the incarnation of being, for me, than anyone before him. Maybe it was the fragile state of my own being, as one mother, watching another lose everything dear to her. Or maybe it was God talking. As I listened to him, and to Elizabeth’s best friend, and to Patty, her mom, I could see and feel the spectrum of being that this young girl had embodied.

She had seized the opportunity life presented her to share herself with others—not gratuitously, but selectively, with well-chosen words set down on paper or in images on film, or even in the way she spoke or dressed or decorated her room at home. These gifts were given, and accepted, with equal grace and care.

In our community, many families are enduring the holidays this year fresh with the loss of a child. Others are fearful for their family members or friends serving in Iraq.

The deep tradition of giving gifts as a celebration of Christmas or Channukah will be hard on some of them. Children will still find joy in a wrapped toy or a shiny bike under the tree, but many families will feel the sting of loss more in the midst of holiday cheer.

The gift they most desire is just out of reach.

My son and I are easy to buy gifts for. We like “things.” We share a fancy for cameras and cars, adornments of home or self, books and art. My husband and daughter are more of the mind—music, which is now more ethereal than real, thanks to i-Tunes, is their greatest joy. My husband’s older sons have lobbied hard this year for money—they have needs beyond Christmas presents under the tree.

The one friend I find it easiest to gift wants nothing from me for Christmas this year (which means, I guess, that I’ll get nothing too.) I’ll have to save her Christmas present for her birthday, in January.

In my extended family, of cousins and uncles and aunts, we have a round-robin method of gift giving, to keep the holidays from engorging us with material wealth. Only children are exempt from the single-gift theory.

A gift of charity is becoming more common—for those who have everything, or just need nothing. More of us are seeing the disparity of wealth in the world as something to address individually if not collectively, especially at the holidays.

Entreaties to shop locally are becoming easier to fulfill in our small town of Narrowsburg, with the addition of shops like Nest and 4 Corners, and the many artful gifts at the River Gallery and the DVAA shop, Signatures.

Art is always a welcome gift, and it is doubled by giving—once, from the artist to the world, twice, by the giver to the gifted. The best gifts are not only local, but personal. As Angus reminded us, it is the giving of ourselves to others that will endure beyond our lifetime.