Previously by Rachel Brownson: Sunday at the Children’s Hospital.

My grandparents’ living room was almost too warm after the cutting December wind outside, and the Christmas tree blinked pink and gold, ringed with piles of boxes. My cousins and their parents could be heard laughing and bickering in the den downstairs, and as we shed our chilly coats and exchanged the usual hugs, I looked around for my uncle Dave, wondering which version of him was here today. As we sat down I heard his heavy step on the deck behind the sliding doors, and he came slowly into view: tall in his dusty-looking coat, his round belly pressing at the zipper, his University of Michigan knit cap pulled down over his ears, cigarette smoke emerging in clouds from behind his graying beard. He was pacing the deck as he often did, walking on the wooden benches, followed closely by his hyperactive little black poodle. Seeing us, he stubbed out his cigarette, came into the room in a gust of cold, and made his round of hugs. “Rachelieu,” he said—pleased as always with the nickname he’d found for me—as he wrapped me in his big smoky arms.

It never occurred to me growing up that not everybody had an uncle who was odd in the particular way Dave was odd, that schizophrenia did not run like a crooked line of stitches through the cloth of most other families the way it did through mine. I was pretty sure for a long time that the primary reason everyone told kids not to do drugs was because the experience might trigger a psychotic episode. This is not to say that I felt entirely comfortable with Dave’s illness; we were told from a young age not to be alone with him, and I remember a few times early in my childhood when he said things I knew were not the kinds of things one says to children. His first hospitalization had happened before I was born, and it wasn’t until I was a teenager that they found an antipsychotic medication that worked well for him.

*

The first hospital where I worked as a chaplain was our hometown hospital, a pleasant, well-kept facility with around two hundred beds, including ten psychiatric beds. I was in my first year of seminary, and the job at the hospital was my internship: ten hours a week visiting old ladies getting knee replacements, middle-aged guys getting their hernias repaired, women with breast cancer, children with bronchiolitis. And I also visited people of all ages who came to the hospital when they could no longer manage their thoughts or behaviors—people like Dave. This was the hospital where he would come when he couldn’t shut out the voices anymore. This was the hospital where he died.

i.

On the last wedding anniversary my parents ever celebrated, my mother and father slept in a room that once housed King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It was everything my mother had both expected and could not imagine: a bedchamber sequestered in a dark-stoned turret, up a spiral staircase and behind a thick wooden door. The room featured a four-poster bed with a gold-fringed canopy, a lion-clawed tub, and a window for every cardinal direction. In Mom’s estimation, these were the things that were due to kings, queens, and their lovers.

My parents had left me and my younger sisters in the care of cousins while she and my father, along with my aunt and uncle, found refuge in this weekend getaway in Gloucestershire. It was a celebration, after all. But despite the verdant trappings of a walled garden, rows of observant suits of armor that kept post in the buttressed halls, and personalized room service for any given occasion, there was the unsettled memory of my mother’s recent miscarriage that kept her enjoyment at bay. On the actual night of her anniversary, she drank more than she usually did — my mother is a moderate drinker — while she, my father, my aunt, and my uncle laughed at the resemblance the waiter bore to the ever-abashed Manuel from the BBC show Fawlty Towers. I know nothing!, my aunt or uncle probably blared, quoting the show. She drank so much that when it was time to order dessert, she, the sole American, could not ask for her favorite dish: bread pudding with raisins, or, as it is commonly called in England, spotted dick. Spotted dick! my father or uncle or aunt most likely tried to say, choking on laughter and the flaming aftermath of digestifs. This was helping my mother, pushing away the interloping sadness. They all drank so much that someone spilled a glass of water, and another waiter had to ask them to quiet down.

Here is something my mother never told me, but something I am sure of yet. After my mother and father clambered up their turret and into their room; after they had stopped laughing, the first laughter they had shared in a long while, and probably one of the last; after they turned their backs to each other in the bed, their spines interlocked in a way both familiar and mournful, like conjoined egg yolks in a bowl; after my mother thought of what they would have named the baby if it had become her baby; after all this, she remembered that Henry and Anne had once slept here, and wondered how a chopping block could make a world of difference.

Look, when you click on an article titled “What It’s Like To Date Your Dad,” you know what you’re getting yourself into. Of course, the second you see a headline like “What It’s Like To Date Your Dad,” clicking is no longer optional. It’s rather like the Babadook, in that sense.

It’s distressing! (But you already knew that.) There are a great many questions that are brought up but barely addressed within the interview! (But you already knew that.) It does not seem like the dad in question has practiced Being The Responsible Adult in a healthy and appropriate way! (But you really, really already knew that.)

But easily the most upsetting portion of this deeply unsettling piece (I DO NOT BELIEVE FOR A SECOND THAT SHE ACTUALLY TOOK HER DAD-BOYFRIEND TO PROM AND THAT NOBODY NOTICED; NOR DO I BELIEVE THAT HER GRANDPARENTS ARE TRULY PLANNING ON ATTENDING THEIR UPCOMING WEDDING) is this:

Like most members of the human race, I love being told what to buy. I am also, in my heart of hearts, a snoop, so I like to know what random Internet strangers find valuable. I rarely purchase any of these recommended items, as Canadian duties and shipping costs on these largely American-crafted lists are often prohibitively expensive, but one Friday in the late fall of 2012, an item on a Jane Marie Bargain Bin stopped me dead in my tracks: tiny Christmas elf candlestick holders in aseasonal shades of blue, green and silver, with faces sliced cleanly in half.

I do not know if my mouth gasped, but surely my soul did.

My Christmas tastes are, for the most part, fairly conventional. I shrink from garish, Griswoldian displays of excess; I like white lights and white birch and dark plaid and mahogany wood. I like these things not because they remind me of a department-store window, but because they serve as a backdrop for something more: a toddler-crafted ornament, or a tacky heirloom imbued with family history. I treasure these moments of discord, when the silly and the strange intrude upon the beautiful. That, to me, is Christmas: the Hallelujah chorus interrupted by a drunken hiccup. These elves were that hiccup.

In order to support each candlestick, the elf’s jolly pom-pom hat was wrapped around one side of the stick, and half a face was curled around the other. The juxtaposition of the elves’ cheery, primary-school colours with the mutilated heads charmed me. I couldn’t help but imagine them as the world’s most resilient druids, assembled in a circle. Or tiny, Technicolor victims of the Red Queen’s laser grid.

I am quick to form immoderate, consuming fancies. I must purchase these, I thought. But for whom?

Of course, there was only one answer.