Comfort and Joy

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Today is the day after Christmas, traditionally known as "Boxing Day."

There are a number of theories why it is called that, and I don't want to get into a discussion of which one may be correct. Suffice to say that several seem to be plausible.

Today, I have been thinking about Boxing Days past.

I guess I got started on this flight of fancy when I happened to recall that it was on Boxing Day in 1972 that President Harry Truman died at the age of 88. And it reminded me that, regardless of what we see on the surface, there is a lot of pain, a lot of loss that people cope with at this time of the year.

Pain and loss are no more or less intense at Christmas than they are at any other time, just more poignant, I suppose. At a time when the rest of the world is anticipating Christmas morning, a person's family and friends are preparing to say their goodbyes.

Chalk it up to the randomness of life, I guess. In spite of whatever significance Christmas Eve and Christmas Day may hold in your life, they have the same characteristics as any other day. They are 24 hours long, about 9 or 10 hours of which are spent in darkness.

And people die on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day — or Boxing Day — the same as they do on the other days of the year.

People die for lots of reasons, of course, and you can argue, if you wish, that some deaths are avoidable. I recall an episode of M*A*S*H in which the staff falsified the records of a patient's death so his children would not have to grow up thinking of Christmas as the day their father died. It became clear early on that this patient would not survive his injuries so they used all the superficial means at their disposal to prolong his life a few hours. Then, when they started to lose him, they adjusted the clock in the O.R. so they could all say it was just past midnight when he died.

Well, whether it is avoidable or not, death happens every day. And, in the long run, does it matter if one dies on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day or Boxing Day? I don't think so. More than any other holiday, Christmas is more than a date on the calendar. It is a season. If someone dies in December, his/her survivors will associate the death with the Christmas season.

In the case of an elderly person or a terminally ill person, I suppose the date of one's death is completely random, the luck of the draw.

And sometimes the death is perplexing. A friend of mine who has been spending Christmas with family in another state will be cutting his holiday short to return to Texas for a memorial service for a good friend. His friend wasn't elderly nor was he in particularly bad health. But he had a massive heart attack before Christmas. The family wanted a private funeral, but the grieving friends will gather for a memorial service next week.

In America, less than four dozen men have been president. No president has died on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day — and Truman was the first to die on Boxing Day. But in my lifetime, we have now had two presidents who died on Boxing Day. Gerald Ford, at the age of 93, died on this date three years ago.

I think, without a doubt, the most tragic loss of life on a Boxing Day occurred five years ago today. An earthquake in the Indian Ocean, with a magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3, triggered a tsunami that killed almost 230,000 people in nearly a dozen countries.

It was the second strongest earthquake ever recorded (second only to the 1960 Valdivia, Chile earthquake), and it was the fifth–deadliest in history. It could have happened any time — but it happened the day after Christmas, when many tourists were spending their holiday in the warm climates of places like Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

And the survivors of all those victims must live with that memory every Christmas.

I can only hope they find some comfort in this season of hope.