Opinions

OPINION: Life, the universe and the Christmas season

As the holidays approach, I’ve been getting little reminders that my late grandmother had dementia before she passed away. I left a forgotten loaf of date-nut bread, my other grandmother’s holiday treat best smothered in cream cheese, baking in the oven for nearly three hours and had stubbornly to core it like a pineapple to salvage the edible center. I sometimes walk into rooms or open the refrigerator, stop, and ask, “Why am I here?”

Maybe these are early red flags. Or maybe I’m just a 42-year-old mom. The holiday season is like the rest of the year, but on steroids. The dietary needs and desires of our three children expand from food for sustenance to a Christmas feast with three different favorite side dishes, pies, sugar cookies, and that favorite treat to put in their stockings that is out of stock everywhere and $54.99 on Amazon. Potlucks are ubiquitous, and school has end-of-semester presentations and dioramas and glue and paint-stained fingers at 9 p.m.

The house needs to look less like a bomb went off for visitors, coworkers are traveling and no one is answering emails, and I have to keep cleaning up the fallen ornaments and pine needles from where our cats played hide-and-seek in the Christmas tree.

When I forget the cats’ names momentarily as I shoo them out of the room, maybe it isn’t genetics. Maybe my brain is just out of room.

When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to install a computer game that my brother had gotten through some back channel of the internet. He’s a computer programmer and as savvy with computers as I am inept, so he did what any good big brother would do: he refused to install it for me until I read his favorite book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams. I ended up loving it and read the entire series.

In the first book, it is revealed that the Earth is actually a huge supercomputer designed to discover the answer to the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything.” After eons of processing, the answer is finally revealed: 42.

Douglas Adams was an avowed atheist, but I see now, before my 42nd Christmas, that there may be some truth in his joke. At 42, we are experiencing the full breadth of life: We are regularly superheroes, fairies, and playmates with our children. We are also assuming leadership roles at work and with other organizations, making sometimes difficult decisions for the group and passing along years of knowledge to younger colleagues. We are mastering our hobbies. We are helping our parents with their heavy lifting and are hosting the family gatherings. We can still physically endure and athletically compete, but our knees are starting to make weird popping noises, the number of gray hairs is starting to preclude plucking, and we are asking and wondering, more urgently, and not always because we can’t remember why we went into a room, “Why am I here?”

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At Christmas, some of us celebrate the Earthly arrival of a God who urges us through his example to love each other, to give, and to do so with humility. At 42, if we are lucky, we might have the extra strength and resources to give more, whether it be our labor, our attention, our knowledge, or our love to children, colleagues, and those who were once 42 themselves. It can be exhausting and may cause us occasionally to think we are losing our minds, but maybe it is also the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Kara Sorbel works and lives in Anchorage with her family.

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