The Gift of an Expectation-Free Christmas

Opinion|The Gift of an Expectation-Free Christmas

It was Christmas night, 2019. At the table beside ours, a recent widow told me about her late husband. My daughter, 11 years old then, bopped between a couple of strollers, each holding a tiny wagging dog. Their owners were older women, at least one of whom had retired from a career in theater — which she said in three syllables (“thee-AY-ter”). Couples laughed and sang a Christmas carol, and our glasses were never empty.

This unlikely gaggle of strangers, some of us in mourning, others just orphaned by fate, came together in a hotel bar and restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif., on this familiest of family holidays. It was probably the freest Christmas of my life.

My father died six days earlier. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive soft tissue cancer two weeks before his death. He’d avoided going to the doctor for as long as he could, and when he was finally diagnosed, we knew he didn’t have long, but we assumed a few months, at least.

Within hours of his death, my daughter and I flew from our home in Washington, D.C., to Arizona, where he’d lived. We met my brother, Joshua, who had traveled from New Jersey — and we embarked on the sobering tasks required of death in America. We arranged for cremation, ordered death certificates, canceled credit cards. I said a final goodbye, alone, to my father at a funeral home.

We discovered one small secret after another in my father’s bedroom, enough of them to complicate the grief we felt. He had a certificate declaring him a soldier in the army of an evangelical megachurch minister. There was a MAGA hat. There was more than a decade of correspondence between my dad and the Internal Revenue Service, in which he tried to avoid paying taxes and the I.R.S. tried to compel him.

And then there was the gun. A brand-new 9-millimeter handgun, in his old beat-up briefcase with the broken zipper.