It was as if someone was saying to us, “You are seen. You are loved.”
The doorbell rang one mid-December evening. I frequently had unexpected visitors in those early days after my husband’s death, sometimes bearing dinner, often with tears. But when my 6-year-old son opened the door, nobody was there.
Instead, on the doormat, was a triangular box, a kit to make a gingerbread house, trimmed with a wide silver ribbon and a note that read “On the First Day of Christmas. …”
A mystery.
Sam had died suddenly in the fall. Suicide. He’d had job stress, like most people do; chronic back pain, which he had managed since he was a teenager; financial concerns, like many parents who have young children, a mortgage and a dog. When he took his own life that clear blue October afternoon in Los Angeles, leaving me a widow and the single parent of our two boys, 6 and 8, I hadn’t seen it coming.
My sons and I had already managed to navigate Halloween, which took on a grisly quality, the celebration of a nephew’s bar mitzvah, and our first Thanksgiving without Daddy, the details of which escape me now but undoubtedly included a mash-up of traditional American cuisine with Cuban and Jewish holiday favorites — a unifying holiday for my husband’s Jewish family and my Christian one.
Still, I was dreading Christmas. How could December have arrived without my husband? I didn’t turn up the holiday tunes or turn out the Christmas decorations. There were mornings when, after I walked Danny and Jason to their elementary school, I wanted to crawl back into bed and not emerge until they came home from college. If any homework got done or I remembered to feed the dog, I counted the day a win.
The next night, the doorbell rang again. Another package. Two snowman mugs, a packet for hot chocolate tucked inside each one, tied with the same silver ribbon and including the same white card, reading “On the Second Day of Christmas. …”
We didn’t hear a car engine or receding footsteps or a muffled giggle. We didn’t see anyone scurry away. Not a shape or a shadow.
I had been desperate to make Christmas happen for my boys, but I couldn’t give them the only thing they wanted, so I shifted my focus to toys. If I prayed for anything those days, it was a Wii, the scarce and coveted video game of 2007. Through tenacity and luck, my mother found one.
My mother also had hung our stockings on the fireplace mantel. Not knowing what to do with Sam’s, she put it back into the box, as though we might forget that he was gone if his stocking was, too.
I retrieved it and hung it on the mantel with the rest of ours.
The third night, I turned on the porch light and turned off the living room lights so we could see who was leaving the gifts, then the boys and I sat on the sofa and waited. But as it grew darker, they grew bored, then hungry.
I went to the kitchen to put dinner together. When the doorbell rang, Danny and Jason ran to the front of the house, but all they found when they flung open the door were three large candy canes. Same silver ribbon. Same notepaper. Same message in the same black, felt-tipped pen: “On the Third Day of Christmas. …”
The industrious elf delivered the fourth day’s offering while we were out, probably at therapy, where we often were in those days, both individually and as a family. We arrived home to find four little tree ornaments, bundled in the silver ribbon. Same square of notepaper. Different color ink this time, and different handwriting, more childlike.
This suddenly seemed like the kind of effort my friend Caren would coordinate, so I mentioned the secret Santa to her, but she insisted that she hadn’t orchestrated it.
“Seriously,” she said. “I wish it was me!”
Not only that, but her children were similar ages to mine, and I doubted they could keep such a secret. Who, then?
For the next couple of nights, my boys lurked near the front door as long as they could, but invariably the bearer of gifts would choose the moment they left to sneak up.
When I was pregnant with our first child, Sam wanted to know if the baby would be a boy or a girl. He was going to be happy either way; he just wanted to be prepared. As first-time parents, we harbored the fantasy that we could be prepared for such things as babies and parenting.
Two years later, when I was expecting our second child, Sam again wanted to know the child’s sex, but by then, I had warmed to the idea of not knowing. On the day of the ultrasound, the baby’s legs were crossed such that the doctor could not determine the sex, and off I waddled with my hidden child safely in utero. I didn’t schedule a follow-up ultrasound. The baby would let us know in due time.
Grieving, too, demands its own not-knowing, without the benefit of a date on which all will be revealed. I didn’t know why Sam ended his life, what had seemed impossible to him, how he had descended so deeply into despair. I didn’t know what I had missed, where I had failed, whether I could have stopped him, how our children and I would be without him. At some point, I would have to learn to live with these many unknowns. And I did.
There was one thing I did know. In those dark days of intense grief, somebody was shining a light our way with a simple but powerful message: “You are seen. You are loved.”
Over the course of the next week, we received nightly offerings. Always simple — six apples, seven clementines, eight packets of gum — each adorned with the signature silver ribbon, the white square note and the childlike handwriting.
It could have been a coordinated effort, a family project, or one delightfully clever friend. I didn’t know and no longer wanted to know. Something about the not knowing appealed to me. I began to corral the boys in the kitchen at the back of the house in the evenings, bribing them with dessert or an extra chapter of “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,” so that the anonymous giver could remain so. I made it my mission to protect their sacred, generous act.
It was a strange feeling, to be wrenched so hard by grief and darkness on the one hand and drawn so firmly toward light and hope on the other. To feel bereft and abandoned yet also held, grounded and supported.
’Tis the season, as they say. The darkness was overwhelming and terrifying and completely unfair when the tender newborn entered the scene. It is hard to imagine that the infant hope will make any difference. But there he is.
After 11 days of offerings, we weren’t sure what to expect when we approached home on that 12th night. I trusted there would be something, but after all the nights building up to that moment, would my boys be disappointed? Would I? They wondered aloud what might await us at home. Chocolates? A dozen cookies?
Two months earlier, I had been greeted in my driveway by two police officers and a priest, there to deliver the news of my husband’s death. It was hard not to relive that surge of panic as I turned from the street and up the slight incline of my driveway, not knowing what might meet us when we arrived.
I often found myself holding my breath when I pulled up to the house. On that night, I heard myself exhale and felt the familiar tightness across my cheeks as tears filled my eyes.
It looked as if someone had delivered to us the contents of an entire sleigh.
The boys opened their car doors and raced to the porch, where they found 12 exquisitely wrapped packages — four for Danny, four for Jason and four for me. All different kinds of paper, every possible color of ribbon, several styles of handwriting. Toys, games, goodies and a Bruin baseball cap in my favorite shade of powder blue.
The white card read: “Merry Christmas!”
Fifteen years later, those two little boys are 21 and 23 and home for the holidays. As for me — long remarried and having mothered a blended family of four sons to adulthood — I have come to know some things. But I still don’t know who gave us those 12 days of hope in the midst of our grief.
And I’m glad I don’t know. Even as it was happening, the not knowing quickly became my favorite part. That mysterious light pushing its way into our ineffable darkness. Not a miracle. Not magic. Just generous, selfless, human love.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Charlotte Maya, a writer in Pasadena, Calif., is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Sushi Tuesdays.”
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
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