I sat on the floor surrounded by ornaments and worked it open, and I had to stop — because the envelope was old, far older than me, and it was addressed to my mother in a hand I recognized: my grandmother’s. And it had never been opened. The seal was still whole.
My grandmother died when I was a baby. I never knew her. But my mother had kept this letter, sealed, riding in the ornament box beside the glass bird every December of my life, re-wrapping it each year, seeing it each year, and choosing — every single Christmas — not to open it.
I did not understand that until I read what was written on the outside of the envelope, under my mother’s name, in my grandmother’s hand: “Open when you need me most.”
And then I understood everything, and I had to put it down and breathe.
My mother never opened it because she could not bear to spend it. As long as the letter stayed sealed, her mother still had something left to say to her — one more conversation, waiting, always there, for the day it got bad enough to need. And I think my mother, being who she was, kept deciding year after year that she could get through this Christmas on her own, that she would save her mother’s last words for a worse day, that she was not ready yet to reach the bottom of the well.
She never opened it. She saved her mother’s voice her entire life. And then she died in November, and the day she needed it most turned out to be a day she never got to.
So I opened it for her. It felt like the only thing to do. And my grandmother, reaching across two generations and more than half a century, had written a short letter to a daughter facing a hard day — and the line that undid me was this: “If you’re finally reading this, then things are hard, and I’m not there, and I’m so sorry. But you were never as alone as you felt, my girl. I have been proud of you every single day, watching or not. Now go hang the bird, and let it be me, smiling down at you from the top of the tree.”
The glass bird had been my grandmother’s. That is why my mother treated it like it was made of something more precious than glass, why she alone unwrapped it and hung it and packed it away. It was her mother, at the top of the tree, every Christmas, smiling down.
I put the tree up this year. I could not the first year, but I did this one. And I unwrapped the glass bird myself, carefully, the way she did, and I hung it at the very top. My grandmother was right. It does feel like being smiled down on. Two women I have loved and lost are up there now, at the top of my tree, and I finally understand what my mother felt about that little glass bird. I will hang it every year for the rest of my life. And someday I will pass it, and the letter, to my own child — and tell them to hang the bird, and let it be all of us, smiling down.
