Joy (and diabetes) to the world

[The following is a ditty I submitted to the Deseret News. They didn't want it.]

In December 1991 my younger brother Kevin started dropping weight. Mom thought it was the paper route—all that pedaling through the slush, up the steep hills, with awkward sacks slung over the handlebars, his snowcap all sweaty. But when he started blacking out at school and pitching, face-first, into the Jefferson Junior High cafeteria lasagna, my parents had him checked out.

I was there when they came home from the doctor’s. Kevin’s cheeks were wet with tears. My parents led me and my two sisters to the family room for what was obviously going to be a solemn family council. Since nothing ever happened to us, and because the drama didn’t involve me, I was pretty excited.

“Your brother has diabetes,” said dad. Since the rest of us knew zilch about diabetes, he might as well have said, “Your brother has triskaidekaphobia.” They explained that Kevin’s pancreas was not producing insulin as it should, and it was making him sick. He would need to spend some time in the hospital over Christmas, which meant that the rest of us, too, would celebrate Christmas in a hospital.

I’m sure someone more pliant would have thought it novel to spend Christmas in a hospital, but I was annoyed. I was even more annoyed when I found out who would be the unlucky kid covering Kevin’s paper route while he was in the hospital. As a teenager, I kept annoyance as my default emotion.

So two days before Christmas Kevin checked into Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. On Christmas Eve Grandpa Smith graciously volunteered to spend the night on the fuchsia fold-out next to Kevin, who was now all tubed up with insulin drip.

On Christmas Day my father woke me at 5am and we folded and bagged copies of the Salt Lake Tribune and threw them in the back of the Voyager. Then we drove into six inches of pristine powder in the dark suburbs of Kearns, into the most profound stillness I had ever experienced. At one point after tossing an orange missile into a snow-covered juniper bush, I stood on the sidewalk in all that stillness and watched the street light on 5400 South turn from green to yellow to red, without a car anywhere on the road, without a noise but the muted fullness of a world covered in snow. I was as moved as a self-absorbed teenager can be.

Back at home, while I was in a hot shower, my parents stuffed Christmas in black garbage bags and loaded the van. Then they woke my two sisters and we piled into the van and drove up to Primary Children’s Hospital where I discovered, to my surprise, that Kevin was not the only child spending Christmas morning in the hospital. As I looked in each room, checking out the inmates, I recall seeing a bald boy with a bandana on his head sitting up in his bed watching TV. I let myself indulge in the noble sentiments of Christmas among the suffering.

Kevin beamed when we walked into his room, black garbage bags over our shoulders like hapless Christmas Elves. He had his hospital pajamas on, and he yanked up his shirt to the chin and showed us how he had learned, after practicing on an orange, how to pump a squirt of insulin into his own guts. With the earned boldness of a hospitalized child, he also told us that from now on he would have to lance his finger and squeeze out his blood onto a strip to test his sugar levels. Since neither I nor my sisters had any idea what our sugar levels were, we envied his bionic coolness, though we had some vague and (it turned out) inaccurate understanding that Kevin would never touch a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup again in mortality.

We opened presents. Santa brought me an Erasure CD, which means I must have been a pretty bad boy that year. Conveniently Kevin got a CD player, so we danced around the hospital bed to British synth pop with butterscotch Life Savers in our mouths. It was not an unpleasant Christmas, not by a long shot.

Sometime during the morning a middle-aged married couple knocked on the door. They gave us a large netted Christmas stocking stuffed with fruit and candy.

“We were here at Christmas with our son a few years ago,” they said. “We know what it’s like.”

Dad was inspired by this family’s charity and decided to inflict his inspiration on the rest of us. The next year on Christmas Eve he made us go caroling to the unfortunate patients at Holy Cross Hospital, where he worked as a health care consultant. Most patients waved us into their rooms with joy, a few waved us off with a Scrooge-like grunt. A few patients greeted us with such elation that we might has well been the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” rather than a sextet from the west side singing Alfred Burt, a shave off-key. It felt good to pass along the holiday bedside manner, even if we were targeting people who, in their weak condition, couldn’t flee or fend us off.

When the family gets together for the holidays and someone starts a great big cheeseball of nostalgia rolling, Kevin’s Diabetic Christmas is the one we all remember most vividly. Positive psychologists—the guys who study happiness, of all things—talk about how the “unquantifiables” tend to trump the material stuff when it comes to joy. Open the i-pod Nano on Christmas morning and the happiness peaks practically before you get it out of the box. Spend time with your family in the hospital listening to Erasure and eating oranges and watching your brother jab himself in the belly with a needle, and you might end up living happily ever after.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

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