How would you like this Christmas story to begin? Every word of it is true, but some truths hurt and others heal.

Dad

A painful truth is that my father John, 62 years old in 1957, became clinically depressed that fall, had a nervous breakdown. He was a farmer, had been all his life. On their hilly hundred acres of pasture with a little corn and wheat, he and my mother Olive had raised five children to adulthood. All by then had moved away. Only Kid No. 6, the late arrival, was still at home. That was me, 13 years old. As you might guess, my world crashed when Dad came unglued.

The Neighborhood

A happier truth to start this story would be our neighborhood: a string of German Catholic farm families along a country road northeast of the town of Glasgow, Missouri. Tradition’s grip was tight, but there was comfort and joy in its timelessness.

Mass was in Latin. People’s lives revolved around St. Mary’s Church. Sisters of the Most Precious Blood staffed St Mary’s School. St. Nicholas gave out candy on December 6. Farmhouses had “K + M + B” written by the pastor in chalk above their front doors, in honor of the three wise men – Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar – who brought gifts to the baby Jesus.

For the Advent novena, nine days leading up to Christmas, the children’s choir sang Latin antiphons a cappella at the front of church. By December 24, St. Joseph’s altar had disappeared behind a forest of cedar trees and an enormous crèche. The statues of Mary, Joseph, and the infant were absent. Specially favored schoolgirls carried these statues in procession before Midnight Mass. The pastor placed Mary and Joseph next to the donkey and the cow, then the infant in the manger. The bells chimed and boomed, the pipe organ pealed, and the adult choir caroled from the loft.

Santa had left presents in most people’s homes earlier that evening. In others, he waited until the family was in church.

The  Girl

You’ll be most pleased, I suspect, if I start this story with the most healing truth in it. That would be a little girl named Wilma, ten years old in 1957. She lived on the farm across the road from ours. She had three older sisters and a younger brother named Leo. Her parents, Norbert and Josephine, were a dozen years younger than my parents.

When Wilma died in Kansas City in 2023, at the age of 76, the Glasgow newspaper published an obituary. I read it with the detached interest you feel at the death of a childhood schoolmate you haven’t seen in decades. Fact is I lost track of Wilma about 65 years ago.

One line in the obituary leapt out at me, however, and awakened the memory this story is about. The obit said Wilma “showed her generosity and care for those beyond family through years of highly engaged community service.”

Amazing! That was exactly what Wilma showed when she was ten years old. Kindness seemed to run in Norbert and Jo’s whole family as if it were a heritable genetic trait. That family has ever been for me the yardstick by which to measure how good neighbors are. Specifically, it was Wilma whose “generosity and care for those beyond family” blessed my parents and me on Christmas Day of 1957, healed us, gave us hope.

Wilma had formed a bond with Dad and Mom the previous summer. Or maybe it was the summer before that, whenever she was old enough that Norbert and Jo started letting her walk alone the quarter mile from their house to ours. They often had her minding Leo, and allowed her to take him with her to visit us. The picture is still vivid in my mind of Wilma and Leo bobbing along from the top of the ridge down the long lane to our house.

My parents were the kind of people who liked having kids around, enjoyed talking with them and letting them help with whatever work they were doing on the farm. My older siblings had only begun to have babies. None lived nearby. Wilma and Leo became my parents’ surrogate grandchildren. I do not remember anything in particular they did when they visited. Leo told me decades later I taught him how to ride a bike, but I have no recollection. Mainly, I think, he and Wilma just enjoyed hanging out with Mom in the house or Dad outside. The enjoyment was clearly mutual.

When Dad Went Away

Once school resumed in September of 1957, visits from Wilma and Leo tapered off. It was during that fall that Dad withdrew within himself. His normal good humor, ready smile and hearty laugh were gone. I had always found it easy to chat with him during chores or meals, but now he was silent, preoccupied, off in his own world. Sometimes he voiced his troubles, but what he said did not make sense.

We humans keep each other sane, and when one family member goes off the beam, the others start drifting. I could tell Mom was suffering almost as much as Dad. They were fiercely in love. She always called him her Rock of Gibraltar. He was tall, strong, caring, responsible, faithful, hard-working, dutiful. But now it was as if he had gone away, in spirit if not yet in the flesh.

Mom sought advice from the pastor and from our family doctor. She shared her worries about Dad also with me and my older siblings. Then she felt guilty for talking about Dad behind his back.

Mom was skilled at overcoming all kinds of troubles by forging ahead with good will, good talk, good food, and a rich dessert. This time it was to no avail. Dad’s standard way of easing almost any pain was, as he said, to work it off. This method was now equally in vain.

Things came to a head on Thanksgiving weekend. Dad now stayed in bed, I’m not sure why, because he could not sleep. My sisters and my brother Gene came to the farm that weekend. Dad scarcely spoke with them and when he did, he rambled incoherently. The pastor came out, sat in a chair beside Dad’s bed, talked, listened and prayed with infinite patience, assuring Dad of God’s love.

That Sunday evening Mom arranged Dad’s dinner on a tray and told me to carry it to him in the bedroom. I did so. Dad did not look up at me, nor say what he always said when I did him some small favor, “Much obliged, pal.” When I returned to the kitchen, I dissolved in tears. A brother-in-law walked me down to the barn. We stayed there talking in the twilight.

After a long while, I saw in the distance five men emerge from the house and head to Gene’s car in the laneway. There was our pastor, our family doctor, neighbor Norbert, Gene, and Dad. I heard Gene say, “Dad, don’t you want to say good-bye to Kenny?”

Dad turned toward the barn. It was almost dark, but he could see me running toward him calling, “Good-bye, Dad.” “Good-bye,” he answered, then got into Gene’s car. I watched as the car’s taillights grew faint and disappeared.

Mom had told Dad that evening, so she later explained to me, that all concerned had reached the conclusion that he should immediately go into the Still-Hildreth Osteopathic Sanatorium in Macon, a town about an hour’s drive north. Dad had agreed to go.

Fear of Shunning and Stigma

The next three weeks and two days were as awful a time in our farmhouse as the previous few months had been. Mom worried constantly about Dad and wondered when or if he would be cured of his illness and come home. I went to school every day, but Dad stayed on my mind. Would he ever again be the father I knew before he slipped away?

I also worried that even if Dad recovered fully, the people in our neighborhood, our parish, and our town might no longer accept him as they had before, as a respected member of the community. I knew the meaning of terms like “insane asylum” and nuthouse. I had witnessed how former mental patients in town were regarded with suspicion, ostracized, stigmatized, feared, made fun of, shamed and shunned.

I was glad that Dad had not been taken to a place whose very mention sent chills up my spine: Fulton, a town southeast of Glasgow, location of the nearest state hospital for the mentally ill. I hoped, correctly as it turned out, that the Macon sanatorium did not inflict so deep a stigma as the one in Fulton did.

The Night Before Christmas

It might have been December 24, but I think it was the day before, that the psychiatrist in charge at Macon phoned Mom and said, “I think your husband is ready to come home.” Norbert and Jo put their Christmas preparations aside and drove Mom to Macon to pick Dad up. He was packed and waiting when they arrived.

Within minutes of arriving home, Dad was down at the barn feeding the cattle and checking on things, but he was not his old self. He was not distant from me as before, but he was sadder, more sober and serious.

Dad said he and Mom and I should all go to church on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, so that the pastor could hear our confessions. This was the custom in those days. Soon after our return home that evening, Dad and I were again down at the barn doing chores. Seeing the headlights of a car driving down our lane toward the house, I ran to see who was coming. It was Dad’s brother Theodore, owner of an adjacent farm. He had seen us at church. I walked with him down to the barn where Dad was.

“I’m glad you’re home, John,” Uncle Theodore said. He and Dad shook hands. The Westhues brothers were a tight-lipped, Teutonic lot. That meeting was about as effusive as they knew how to be. I hoped it made Dad as happy as it made me.

Christmas Day

We must have gone to Midnight Mass. I do not remember. My memory of Christmas morning is the quiet of our farmhouse. Only Mom and Dad and I were there. My siblings were all spending the holiday with in-laws. There was no snow or wind. It was cold and gray outside.

I probably spent most of the day reading. My parents usually gave me books for Christmas and birthdays. There must have been holiday phone calls that day from my sisters and brothers. I do not recall.

The phone call I remember was from Josephine, our neighbor across the road. “Olive,” she said, “Wilma says she wants to walk over and eat Christmas dinner at your house. Would that be okay?”

Mom said yes. I was thinking, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.” If Wilma was ready to treat Dad’s breakdown as a thing of the past, to accept him and Mom as they were before things fell apart, then there was hope. In time, the pieces would all fit together again. 

The New Year

I had trouble deciding how to start this story. Finishing it is easier. While it does not have a storybook ending (nothing in real life does), it does end with healing truths.

Week by week, Dad’s sadness lifted. Gradually he climbed back on top of life. In the summer of 1958 and later years, I enjoyed working with him on the farm. He and Mom took delight in their grandchildren, who numbered 17 by the time Dad died in 1970.

What cured Dad was a combination of blessings. The treatment he received in Macon was one of them. Mom’s love for him and his for her were bigger blessings. To some degree, I believe, Dad did work his troubles off. Our pastor, our family doctor, neighbors like Norbert and Jo and Uncle Theodore, my brothers and sisters – all these people played their parts. None pushed Dad away. All looked for ways to show him acceptance and care.

That is what Wilma did on Christmas Day. Like the little drummer boy in the famous carol, she had no gift to bring. She brought herself and kind words. I’m sure Dad smiled at her.