Christmas dinner was a solemn affair this year, mainly because Julie and Juno and I were the only dinner guests. Normally we have a houseful, or friends have a houseful and we’re part of it. Laughter and kitchen noise and happy greetings make up our usual Christmas soundscape.

This Christmas, in what suddenly seemed like an empty house, we were wishing others were with us. Nobody among close friends and family has died in the pandemic, but our solitude reminded us that there are people—once close—we will never see again. In the absence of loud and happy conversation, people we hadn’t seen or thought of for a long time crept into the silences. Several times in the past year, when I put the name of an old acquaintance into a search engine, I found an obituary. It was a shock, every time, even though I can read the actuarial tables as well as anybody.

Julie and I and Juno did do a Christmas ski into Redfish Lake Lodge during the late afternoon. We had to wait for Julie’s pie to come out of the oven, so by the time we got on the snow, the day was already getting darker. By the time we reached the Redfish docks, a snowstorm was beginning to hover over the peaks. The dark chased us back to the car. We had to take off our sunglasses or we couldn’t see to ski.

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Once home, Julie got serious with dinner. Juno went to sleep on the floor in front of the woodstove.

The menu:

Grilled Leg of Lamb
Roasted Garlic Potatoes
Kale and Arugula Salad with Pine Nuts
A ’16 California Zinfandel
Port or Brandy
Apple Pie
Black Coffee
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Movie)

We made it as far as the Zinfandel, although I did get the dishes done before I fell into bed.

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Although it’s not listed, guilt was on our Christmas menu. This year has brought with it too many examples of lives ended, jobs and homes lost, careers destroyed, hopes dashed. We find ourselves dismayed that our country consistently ignores—when it doesn’t deliberately harm—the poor people within its borders. We know that our Christmas dinner—all paid for, consumed under our own roof, with enough left over for Boxing Day—puts us among a fortunate minority of Americans. Our economy has become a zero-sum game, and this winter, if you watch the news, having enough can feel like a crime.

At the same time, we fear the sudden change of circumstance that could render our happiness into grief, our savings into worthless paper, our health into sickness, our world into ruins. Both of us absorbed the deep lessons of Depression Era parents and grandparents: work hard, save compulsively, use it up, wear it out, make it do, never buy new. Both of us absorbed the even deeper lessons of the Cold War and of the AIDS epidemic and of nursing homes: in the end, other people make your life-and-death decisions for you. You can do everything you’re supposed to do and still have no idea if your virtuous, well-planned, well-deserved life will last out the week.

Here’s the mantra: It’s really not up to you. It’s never been up to you. It will never be up to you.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t feel guilty about it.

Julie and I have spent nearly thirty years in the muddy psychic terrain between the guilt of having a good life we didn’t really deserve and the anxiety of losing it all through no fault of our own. Yet life remains interesting and full of joy. It’s a contradiction we’re in no hurry to resolve.

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A week before Christmas, we cut a small skinny tree from a thicket of volunteer lodgepole in the back yard. We decorated it with lights and strings of beads, and the ornaments that Julie’s grandparents gave her over the years she was growing up. We attached red velvet bows to the ends of branches, wrapped the tree-holder in a brocaded cloth, and turned on the lights.

It looked just like all the other Christmas trees we’ve decorated over the years. Now and then we get a new ornament as a gift, and this year Julie made a needlepoint snowman that sits up near the top. But anyone seeing our tree this year and seeing any of our other trees over the last twenty years would have trouble distinguishing between them. Dr. Seuss could claim them all as his own.

We called it good. We called it funny-looking. We called it beautiful. In our house, all those things go well together.

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We did finally watch A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on Boxing Day. It’s a movie about Fred Rogers, whose television show for young children, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, was the subject of parody and ridicule for its general sappiness. But it was also a program that met tiny children on their own turf. It was designed to address what worried them, what made them angry or confused, and what made them happy.

Fred Rogers had figured out that few children, even ones raised in privileged homes, get to have real selves in real time. They get damaged by families who love them for who they are expected to be, not for who they are. In every episode, though, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood treated them like real persons. For many of these children, it was the first step on a lifetime project of realizing they were a person, and that personhood was worth protecting and nurturing.

The movie made it clear that Fred Rogers, a Christian minister, lived as he believed. He practiced Christian charity, which simply meant that he genuinely loved his fellow humans and, when he had the opportunity, acted on that love.

The movie also made it clear that living a life of Christian charity isn’t easy. It takes time, sweat, tears, and pain, but it’s likely the only path most of us have to any kind of earthly happiness. As for the people around you, you allow them to have real selves in real time. It’s good for them and the company of real people is really good for you.

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One of the lines in the movie referred to the idea—widespread across cultures and countries—that just about the time you learn how to live, you get old and die. It might be more accurate to say that when the evidence becomes overwhelming that you’re mortal, you become open to the idea that life isn’t all getting and spending, winning and losing, righting wrongs and making sure that you’ve justified your life exactly as you’ve lived it. All of these things are crushing burdens for human beings, and any idea that counters them—such as the soul being a process, one that by definition will never be completed—comes as a happy and freeing revelation.

Every few years I reread Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, an improbably cheerful book that details how human beings are creatures with divine minds trapped in mortal bodies. Becker says the death is a reality we cannot face, and that our lives, our bank accounts, our houses, our art and literature, and our children if we have them, are all attempts to live beyond our Biblically mandated threescore and ten.

A pandemic becomes a near-death experience and causes us to even more emphatically deny that we are subject to death. Becker notes that the same thing can happen when your football team loses a championship game, or your new car gets a ding in a parking lot, or a typo is discovered in your just-published book. Make any little thing into your immortality project, and it can be a near-death experience if you find a flaw in it.

Becker was a psychologist and social scientist. He was dying of cancer as he was writing Denial of Death. His editors had to finish his book for him, which is delightfully ironic enough to get him into the Writer’s Hall of Fame. He’s immortal in my mind.

His editors also put together a posthumous volume called Escape from Evil. It consists of his notes on the problem of bad people, and he, no doubt by habit, locates the dark side of the human psyche—our fallen nature—in our inability to come to terms with death. We kill people so we don’t have to die ourselves, and we hurt them so we don’t have to feel pain. We leave damaging legacies so our descendants, in their suffering, won’t forget us. We imagine that others want us to die, and that justifies any atrocity we choose to commit against them. Once they’re dead and we’re still alive, we’ve triumphed over death. Or so we think. Temporarily. But only if we’re good at lying to ourselves.

Becker believes in science. He places his faith in the scientific method as a reliable way to know the universe we’re in. He notes that organized religion owes existence to its offer of an escape from death, but he doesn’t comment one way or another on an afterlife. An afterlife is not subject to scientific investigation in the same way as an all-too-present, all-too-real fear of death. Becker, with some wisdom, focuses on what he could explore in the world he still occupies, saving questions of the afterlife for after his life.

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I used to tell my student advisees, usually when they had come back from a family funeral and were in their first away-from-home existential crisis, that regardless of what happened after death, death itself was a major lifestyle change. You couldn’t expect to go through it and not have a period of serious adjustment, if you had anything left to adjust.

My students were oddly comforted by this view of things, mainly because religious dogma fails pretty badly at funerals. Conventional certainties about eternal life, as Becker indicates, don’t fare well in the face of an open casket.

My own view of the afterlife is not marked by any certainty whatsoever, but at times I do speculate that everybody goes to hell after death, and hell is an indefinite period of examining, from a cosmic perspective, every evil thing you ever did. You get to relive every anger, every easy way out, every mean thought, every bit of sloth, avarice, self-righteousness, greed, envy, lust, and gluttony, all from a position of knowing better. I’ve been proceeding on the hope that you get time off if you start early.

Heaven springs into existence when you finally own up to your sins, understand why you committed them, and know that you’re not capable of committing them again.Not many people make it to heaven, at least on any human scale of time.

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Science is a method of questioning reality, and as such it gives many more answers about what isn’t than what is. It tends to destroy religious dogma on contact. Didactic images of the afterlife fall apart in the face of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Wine is much more likely to turn to water than the other way around. Walls do not tumble down when you blow ramshorns at them. Snakes do not talk. People cast into fiery furnaces do not walk unharmed out of them.

Demonic possession is a real thing, but the demons turn out to be brutal grandparents seven generations removed, their sins cascading onto the heads of their descendants through time.

Resurrection and eternal life? Still awaiting scientific evidence.

One thing that science seems to be unable to falsify is Christian ethics. Simply put, you don’t have to believe that Christ exists to behave like him. You don’t have to prove that God exists if God is love. In the presence of love, the eternal starts edging into our lives. Also questions of conscience spring up. They tend to banish questions about the afterlife into an irrelevant future.

If you’re looking for certainty in this world, there’s plenty of it on your own plate, in the choices you make to be kind or not. You certainly don’t have to wonder whether or not they exist.

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Four hundred thousand more Americans have died in 2020 than died in 2019. That number is evidence enough that business as usual will not occur in this generation.We will never go back to what we were.A new generation has been forged this year, and it will have to live in a new world. A lot of happy conversations are going to be tempered by silences.

Four hundred thousand. No science of grief exists to quantify the effect those deaths have had on the families torn apart by them, but none is needed. The grief is there, enormous and unmoving. There’s no explaining it away. You can refuse to share it, but only at the cost of ignoring the truth that one of those grieving families could be yours.

Will be yours. Grief is woven into the fabric of human existence. Loss is the price of having love in your life. It’s worth it, but that doesn’t make it any less painful.

Fred Rogers had the ability to value and respect little kids as they were when he was talking to them. For a lot of them, that was the moment they snapped into personhood. To have someone focus on who you are and what you’re trying to express seems to be essential for human development, judging from the amount of people walking around who never became persons.

We owe it to ourselves to pay attention to each other, if only so we can live in a world where when you look at a human, you can expect somebody to be in there.

There’s room for Christian ethics in our response to the grieving, even if it’s only to say, “What you’re feeling is real. I’m sorry this thing happened to you. I will grieve with you, so you won’t be alone in your grief.”

That sort of thing won’t save the world, but it will make one small part of it—your part of it—a friendlier place.