Two years ago,  only weeks before the beginning of the pandemic, I figured out another of the reasons I am grateful. I sat in a chair in a hospital room while my sister stood beside the bed, holding my Aunt Crystell’s hand, talking through the stories we had heard all our lives. 

“Remember that story about how you caught Grandma getting the Santa Claus suit out of the closet when you were just a little girl, Cris?” Belinda said. 

And my aunt, who had suffered a major stroke only four days before, would say, “Well, I was about fourteen, but I was so surprised,” her words slow and slurred because of the stroke and the feeding tube that was keeping her alive. “When Mama told me there wasn’t really a Santa Claus, I couldn’t believe it. Then I asked her if Betty knew.”

Belinda and I knew the next line by heart because we had heard her tell this story so often. Crystell had been a teenager at the time and our mother, Betty, was only eleven, but already in love with that Kenneth Terry. The way my aunt always ended the story was that she figured my dad told mom there wasn’t a Santa Claus on the night of their wedding five years later.

Betty and Crystell Ayres were girls who believed in Santa Claus. And why not? He showed up every Christmas Eve of their lives, rattling a string of bells outside and knocking on the door, coming into the front room of their three-room Porter, New Mexico home with a red felt sack full of presents. Practical presents like flour sack blouses, an orange, a bag of hard candy and peanuts, and maybe when they were small, a baby doll and some hand sewn doll dresses. Santa always showed up.

My sister then told a story she remembered about Santa Claus, how sometime in the late 50’s when she was eight or nine, all the grandkids were kept in a back bedroom at Grandma and Papa’s farmhouse until Santa showed up. “It was a pile of kids,” Belinda said, rubbing Crystell’s wrist. Cris complained of being cold in that hospital room, and having her right arm and hand rubbed seemed to comfort her. Her left side was numb from the stroke.

Cris closed her eyes. “Yes, that certainly was a pile of kids,” she said. I wasn’t born yet that year when Bendy was eight, but I knew that by the late 50s, there would be all the locals plus several out of town cousins. Before Crystell and Marvin’s Susie and I came along in 1959 and 1960, there were already over 20 grandchildren in the Ayres family. Some were teenagers by the time of Belinda’s story, a couple were married. So in that back room at the farmhouse there were easily twelve or fifteen kids.

“Santa came through that door and all I could think was about how short he was compared to last year. And he talked just like Marvin!”

Cris smiled a lopsided smile. “Oh Marvin loved playing Santa Claus,” she said.

“And he loved scaring all of us to death, didn’t he?” I laughed. “And playing practical jokes.” Crystell’s beloved husband Marvin Terry was also my dad’s brother. Those Ayres girls had ended up marrying brothers, Kenneth and Marvin Terry, so that my parents were the youngest of ten on both sides and Cris and Marvin were the next to youngest. Inseparable as siblings, the two couples were then inseparable as young married couples. Belinda was the first baby in September of 1951, followed by Janis in October the same year. At the end of the line were Susie and then me. Susie had been my best and closest friend all my life.

I remembered when I stopped believing in Santa Claus. Even after they sold the farm and moved to Tucumcari, after Papa Ayres ended up in the Van Ark Nursing Home, Grandma insisted on having Santa at her house on Christmas Eve. When I was eight, my brother Klee got the honor of wearing the Santa suit. Like Belinda with my Uncle Marvin, I knew something was up when Santa was shorter this particular year than he had been last year when my Uncle Lewis, tall and lean, wore the suit.

We kept talking. It was a treat to be alone in this room with my sweet aunt, even if the circumstances felt so dire. Her three daughters were outside in the hall on their phones talking to their children and other cousins. The doctor had been in an hour prior to tell us there was no change, that Cris was unlikely to ever get out of bed, and then he had asked her if she wanted to keep the feeding tube inserted. He had explained that it was the only thing keeping her alive, but that it would require her to have constant care and she could never live alone again.

Crystell was my aunt who, at eighty-eight, lived independently, getting in her car every day to go to the Tucumcari hospital to volunteer as a pink lady, or to a basketball game to watch her great-grandson play pee wee ball, or to dinner at my mom and dad’s house in Logan, or to the Senior Citizen’s for lunch followed by three hours of playing dominoes. She drove to Clovis to go shopping. She ate an apple and an avocado for breakfast every day of her life. And every Sunday after driving to San Jon to worship at the First Baptist Church, she delivered home baked cookies to the Quail Run Nursing Home. Every time they left Quail Run, Cris told Laura Fox as they were leaving, “Oh Laura, never let me end up in a place like that.”

When the doctor asked if she wanted to keep the feeding tube inserted or just be made comfortable until the end, she said, “comfortable.” It was not a surprise to Vicky or her husband Don or me, the only ones in the room at the time, but the reality of what that answer meant made Don step away with tears in his eye.

“You have had a good life, right Mrs. Terry?” the doctor said gently in his clipped English and she said, “A great life. I have had a great life.” 

Later I would stand at the end of the bed while her daughters Janis, Vicky and Susie each asked her in turn whether she was sure she wanted the feeding tube removed. When it was Susie’s turn, she said, “Mom, do you want to go to be with Daddy and Levi?” 

Susie’s nineteen-year-old Levi was killed in a car wreck along with his dad on November 1 in 2004, and the loss had been the hardest blow in our lives. Marvin died seven years later after a grueling fight with Parkinson’s, at the end of which we all stood in their living room, reassuring him that he could go now, that they were all at peace, Cris crying the hardest and saying over and over how much she loved him and that soon they would all be together.

I leaned over to Susie the day her daddy was dying. I hugged her and said, “You know, he’ll be shooting baskets with Levi any minute now.” Today she reminded me of that. “You said the one thing that gave me comfort the day my daddy died.”

We are all so intertwined, my parents and Marvin and Cris and their girls. Just a few months ago, Cris and Janis were at my house in Logan for a Christmas family dinner. In the picture we took at the end of the evening, she sits in the middle of thirty-one of us, her hair as perfectly coiffed as always, smiling that wide smile. One of the biggest shocks of seeing her in the hospital is that she’s not wearing lipstick and her hair is flattened against her skull.

My mom, as practical as ever even when she is broken hearted, leans over her only remaining sister’s hospital bed. “Cris,” she says, “do you want to go home to Tucumcari or to Marvin?” Cris points to the ceiling. “There. Marvin.”

My mom smooths Cris’ hair and steps away from the bed for just a second, takes a deep breath, and then she turns back. “Remember that song Papa always used to sing?”

The Ayres household was always full of songs. Papa, a calm, quiet man who seldom spoke, sang all the time. His daughters were the Ayres Family Quartet, Ruby singing soprano, Mary Belle, Margaret, and Doris all singing harmony with her, Bertha Mae frequently joining them. Mom and Cris were the little sisters.

I’ve heard stories all my life of how they would curl up under benches or tables and listen to their big sisters sing at gatherings, falling asleep long after dark while their sisters kept the songs going.

“Sing the wondrous love of Jesus,” my mom begins in her strong alto voice. I have always had perfect pitch when I stand next to her at church. “Sing his mercy and his grace.” Belinda and I join her and then Janis, Vicky, and Susie. Don joins in with his bass “In the mansions bright and blessed, he’ll prepare for us a place.”

And then Cris is singing with us, “when we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be, when we all see Jesus, we’ll sing and shout the victory.” We are not loud, just strong, and then my mom goes out to the waiting room to get my dad.

We stand in a circle, joined by Jim Ed Lee, whose parents were Marvin and Crystell’s best friends in San Jon and who went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening with my cousins. As a little girl, I thought the Lees were part of my family. 

Jim Ed has been patiently waiting with my dad, saying how much he misses his parents and how Cris has been there for him these past years since his mother passed away. She’s been his rock, just like she was when she was his Sunday School teacher.

At that moment, when we are all gathered in a circle, holding hands, ready to pray, the palliative care doctor comes into the room, ready to discuss options. Vicky turns to her. We have been waiting all day to talk to this doctor.

“Do you think we could take a minute to say a prayer?” Vicky asks, and the doctor nods. “I’ll wait outside for you.”

And then my sweet eighty-six-year-old daddy starts to pray. It is a treat to hear him pray. He’s really talking to his best friend, the person he loves and trusts the most. I never tire of his prayers and I never want him to hurry and wrap it up. My dad is a friendly man and he loves to talk. He mostly loves to talk to Jesus.

He begins, “Lord, we come to you in the most humble way possible, but sometimes, Lord, it feels like we have to remind you to help us.” He is as sad as the rest of us. Cris has been a part of his life for over eighty years. 

But Cris is not having it. “God doesn’t have to be reminded,” she says weakly from the bed, and we all smile. This is so Cris. She knows who is in charge and she’s comforted by her faith.

Belinda and I will go home to Logan and then to Tucumcari to prepare Crystell’s home for her return. Her daughters will bring her home and stay by her side for the next nine days before she passes on February 21, 2020.

She will be surrounded by her children and grandchildren, lying in a hospital bed that we set up so that she can look at a picture of Marvin on the wall next to her, his smile wide because he had just won the cow chipping contest at the Quay County Fair. One day I’ll sit next to her and read from the Psalms and she’ll hold my hand, gazing at the love of her life. Just a few days later, she’ll quietly let go, this woman who has lived her life so well and cared for so many. 

This is why I love New Mexico. My family hasn’t been here for three hundred years, but we have been here since 1917 when both sets of my grandparents came to the state to prove up on homestead claims that others had abandoned. I am as tied to this country and these people as I could possibly be. When I have moved away for a year or two, I have always prayed, “God if you’ll just get me back, I’ll never leave again.”

These are my people. This is my home. But more importantly, it is the place where my heart lives. This is the place that holds my history and that lets me be who I want to be. It is what feeds my soul.

Crystell knew exactly what she wanted that day in the hospital, and it is because of her faith and the strength of her connections in her family and community. There’s incredible security in knowing who you are and what you want.

There is a hole in our lives these days that is Crystell-shaped, just like there will always be one for my Uncle Marvin, and my grandparents, Levi, and all those folks who went before us. But I feel certain my Grandpa Ayres knew exactly what he was saying when he sang, “Sing His mercy and His grace. In the mansions bright and blessed, he’ll prepare for us a place.”

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