The Paper Bag Christmas by Kevin Alan Milne

Author:Kevin Alan Milne [MILNE, KEVIN ALAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC043000
ISBN: 9781599951829
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2008-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

IT WAS MONDAY, December 15, before I was allowed to go back to visit the children at the hospital, though I was hampered by my cast and head bandages.

Dr. Ringle was still out of town, but Christmas was in full swing at the hospital, even without his jolly presence. Aaron and Madhu had tried to visit Katrina during the week I was absent, but she wouldn’t let them in no matter how hard they tried. So my first visit of the evening was to her room while Aaron and Madhu went off to a rehearsal for the pageant.

“Katrina, are you in there?” I said as I knocked lightly on the door.

“Yes. Is that Molar?”

“Yep,” I replied.

“How’s your arm?”

“My arm is fine. It’s just everything else that hurts,” I joked.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. Can I just come in so we don’t have to talk through the door?”

“Just a minute.” There was a light shuffling sound like ruffling of paper, and then she opened the door. She was wearing a new pair of pajamas and a pair of pink slippers, plus the usual white paper bag to cover her head.

Over the next thirty minutes I got to know Katrina better than I’d thought possible. For the first time she opened up and began to talk about herself, sharing some things that were sad and difficult for me to hear, but important for me to understand. The conversation began mildly enough with a few laughs about our brush with death on the gurneys, but then it took a more serious turn.

“Katrina, how come you don’t talk about your sickness?” I asked. “I don’t even know what kind of cancer you have?”

“I used to talk about it more when Grandpa was around. He made me feel better. He always told me everything would be fine.” A new sadness reverberated in her words.

“Did he, you know . . . die?” I asked.

She told me he had died four months earlier of a heart attack, and that now she was a ward of the state under the immediate care of the hospital for medical treatment. She never knew her father—even her mother wasn’t fully sure who her father was—and tragically, a drunk driver killed her mother on the way to work when Katrina was four years old. So for nearly as long as she could remember, she had depended on her grandfather for everything, especially after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in July 1979.

As she recounted the horrific details of her life, I couldn’t help but reflect on how good my own life was. It was a thought I’d never considered before, that there were people far less fortunate than myself. I realized that I had things really easy. I had people who loved me, parents who cared for me, and friends who took interest in me and wanted to be with me. Katrina had none of that.

All she had was a fading memory of a mother and a grandfather who she now missed more than anything in the world.

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