As the holidays roll around once more, I am surrounded by memories of warmth and family love. Of pictures with Santa, the crinkling of wrapping paper and the taste of candy canes. The smell of Christmas cookies, spices and orange peels, and the feeling of being snug in familial hugs. All the lovely moments brought by that jolly spirit, The Ghost of Christmas Past. With Corona virus on the rampage, I can’t help but look back sadly on the days of yore, and lament the lack of family togetherness this year. But then I remember that things could be far worse than the howling wilderness of the Christmas of 2020…I harken back to the Great Christmas Purge, or Norovirus 2010 *jazz hands*.
It started out a Christmas like any other. My sister and her family were visiting at my parent’s house, and Jeff and I drove down with the boys to spend several days and nights with the gang. These are always good times, though always haunted by the possibility of sickness. In those days, my sister’s kids always seemed to be suffering from some sort of upper respiratory ailment. I traveled with hand sanitizer and wondered audibly why her kids were always dripping snot during family gatherings. My sister resented this, and years of loud complaints were avenged when, ironically, the sickness of Christmas 2010 was kicked off by my own children. The gifts were exchanged, the Christmas dinner eaten, and there was nothing left to do but spend several days reveling in fun family activities. My parent’s house was frantic with activity, and the first harbinger of doom occurred almost unnoticed by the crowd. Tyler woke up in the middle of the night, quietly threw up in the toilet and went back to bed. Food poisoning, we reasoned. He was completely fine the next morning.
Then.
The next morning Caleb threw up. Okay, no big deal. He didn’t seem to demonstrate any lasting effects. In fact, he was raring to go the rest of the day. That night we went to Red Robin and enjoyed various beef and chicken burgers in casual family dining style. Well…most of us did. Mom sort of poked at her Whisky River Chicken BBQ sandwich and looked pale and stoic. Her stoicism grew throughout the evening, and during the car ride home she didn’t say a single word. When the car stopped in front of her house, she was gone like a shot, not to be seen for the rest of the night.
The next morning my sister and I prepared for our journeys home. Leaving seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances. In a shocking first that has never since been repeated, my mother refused to leave her bedroom to say goodbye to anyone. “Love you guys!” She croaked through the door. She lay on her bed of pain, later explaining that she felt as though she had been beaten by a thousand baseball bats. She didn’t move from it for the next two days. After seeing mom laid low by a virus for the first time since our early childhood, the rest of us finally began to worry about our own health and wellbeing. My sister’s husband was struck next. He ran upstairs and threw up bare minutes before he was scheduled to drive his wife and two kids for nine hours. He resigned himself to the inevitable, but that bathroom trip was his last. He was one of the lucky ones. My sister, on the other hand, spent the entire nine-hour trip home crying and throwing up out of the van window, into a bag, and at various gas station and truck stop bathrooms. Mercifully, the universe saw fit to protect her from diarrhea at this time.
Jeff and I escaped until we reached home. Then…it began. “Gotta go!” I told my family, and raced frantically to our downstairs bathroom. I didn’t leave it for the next two days. In fact, the following days were the closest I’ve had to a fever dream as an adult. At first, I attempted to get to bed after all the fluids were expelled from my body. I crawled on my hands and knees to my bedroom like a crippled crab but gave up when I noticed how high the bed was. It loomed over me like the crags of Everest, so I simply collapsed on the floor. However, the trips to the bathroom became so frequent that I ended up just living there, either using the toilet or fitfully passed out on the bathmat. Jeff fared only slightly better; he was able to get to his feet at intervals. He came in behind me and cleaned my failed attempts at reaching the toilet with dead eyes, leaned over my prone body and threw up, then made his way back to bed like the anal-retentive zombie that he is. I, at childbirth levels of not giving a fuck, barely acknowledged him, much less felt any kind of embarrassment at the betrayal of my bodily functions.
To this day, I’m not entirely sure how my children managed during this time. They were only six and seven years old. I have to imagine that they scrounged in our cabinets and ate whatever they could find, like wee pioneers. Jeff and I were certainly AWOL for a solid two days. I may have called out during my brief periods of lucidness to ensure they were alive, but to be honest I don’t even remember doing that. Finally, when every drop of moisture in my body was depleted, and the virus gods satiated, I made my way to our precious bed and slept for a solid 18 hours.
When I finally began to take notice again, I turned my head painfully toward Jeff in the bed beside me. Each vertebra creaked and screamed. “Are…the kids alive?” I asked, in a cracked and broken voice.
“I’m pretty sure.” He mumbled.
“Are…we alive?”
“Probably.”
“Did I…puke and shit all over the bathroom floor yesterday?”
“The important thing,” Jeff said firmly, “Is that I think we’re still alive.”
Much later, our entire family was gathered for another holiday and we traded war stories. My mother spoke of the chicken sandwich that she never ate, and of the agony of not being able to say goodbye to her grandkids because of the crippling pain. Ellen shared about the nightmare trip home, and the aftermath of agony when they finally reached it. Jeff and I told of our three hell days, for once without exaggeration because it wasn’t necessary. I live for making a story bigger and better, but there was no way to make our story worse than what actually occurred. We all laughed and shared a sense of camaraderie bourn of fighting in the same war.
As we talked and laughed, my dad’s turned his face this way and that, following the story and looking more and more left out. Finally, there was a lull in the conversation and then it was time for dad’s big moment. “Yeah!” he exclaimed, his voice pained and earnest. “That was a really bad time. I remember that night it started, I felt so bad that I couldn’t finish my beer!” He nodded virtuously, secure in the fact that he too was one of the suffers. Five heads turned toward him as if on a swivel.
“You…what?” Mom said, her voice flat.
“I couldn’t finish…” Dad faltered, realizing that the mob had turned against him somehow. “…My beer.” He finished bravely.
He bore our hostile gazes, unsure of how he had lost the crowd. “I felt pretty bad.” He elaborated. We couldn’t take it anymore, and all of us burst into hysterical laughter. I fell out of my chair and wheezed on the floor. We rehash the Great Christmas Purge at least once a year, and inevitably our very favorite part of the story is when one of the family crows “I felt so bad I almost couldn’t finish my beer!”
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