Dear Santa,

I know you aren’t real, but I have nothing else to believe in. During my childhood, I would have asked for a phone, a skateboard, or even a dog.  I would have behaved impeccably just for the chance at acquiring a commercial piece of trash. A worthless, dust-collecting toy to be quickly forgotten.  Oh, how the times have changed. I may still be a child by technical terms, but I have grown up and no longer have youthful innocence or ignorance. I live in a body destructed by its own flaws.  Cancer is more than just a condition, a zodiac sign, and the topic of disgusting jokes made by heartless teens my age. Cancer is a ruthless, unforgiving animal tearing people like me into shreds.  Slowly taking away eyesight, innocence, limbs, sanity, hope, and worst yet, breath from our lungs. It is the most brutal method of torture, and I would know.

A month after my sixteenth birthday I got my driving permit, and the diagnosis of the terminal illness that is lung cancer.  It was like, Woohoo! You can now drive for the rest of your life! But one more thing, your life won’t be that long.  Devastating, yes.  Hopeless, even moreso.  For the first few months following my earth-shattering diagnosis, I went into hiding.  Not literally, or course. I was actually in plain sight at school when I was healthy enough to go.  My parents didn’t keep me home every day or enroll me in online classes since I wanted to keep everything as normal as possible.  How naive of me to think that my current reality would ever mirror my first sixteen years. The first hardship was obviously the immediate shock and initial treatments.  Then came lugging the dang oxygen tank around. Harder than that, however, and what caused me to hide, was the announcement.

I had to tell the entire football team, my girlfriend, my four year old cousin, my teachers, my church, everyone.  The football team offered their fair share of sympathetic head nods and bro-hugs, which was the easiest to take. Their frontal lobe isn’t connected yet, and so an emotional reaction from them was not something I had to deal with, thank god.  My girlfriend was a bit harder. She knew I’d been out of school for a while, and rumors had already been flying around that I had cancer, or was caught in a house fire, or died, but she didn’t believe them. Until I asked her to come over to our favorite park and she saw me sitting on the swing with an oxygen tank sitting next to my right leg.  She initially looked confused, but as soon as she came within two feet of me, and sat down, she began to cry. I hadn’t said a single word, old man, and she began to sob with every ounce of her being. I did the thing where you tilt your head away and bite your lip trying to keep the tears in, but I just couldn’t. We both knew. No words needed to be spoken.  

My four year old cousin actually came to the hospital, actually, because he knew the doctors already.  He had had to undergo surgery for his biliary atresia a few months prior, so the hospital was where he would occasionally go for checkups.  His aunt brought him in after she found out and while she tearfully embraced my also tearful mom, he came to the side of the bed and told me the surgery didn’t hurt too bad.  He looked at me with his innocent blue eyes and made it seem like there was nothing to worry about and, by god, it was the most heartbreaking moment of my life. It was worse than telling my teachers throughout the next few weeks.  They just gave me pitiful due-date extensions. I don’t even want to talk about my church. I may celebrate Christmas, and my mom might pray more than she cries, but I do not believe in God. So the God Saves! cards were anything but appreciated.  They were merely ritual.

I know it’s strange to celebrate Christmas and not believe in God, but don’t most people?  People like getting stupid stuff, and pretty lights, and catchy songs that will never not be popular.  I did believe in God until my chemo treatments. I went to Church every Sunday, prayed the Hail Mary every time I heard sirens, played in CYO basketball games, and genuinely believed in the Ten Commandments.  The thing is, old man, what kind of God would put so many good, innocent people in these positions and under these conditions? What kind of God gives you breath and then takes it away in a short sixteen years?  Not to mention the science I’ve been exposed to. It defies religion almost entirely. Regardless, I struggle to believe some higher power, who is said to be loving to terrible people, would put so much pain into the life of a child.  Mom likes to say that he wants me back. She claims I’m too good for this screwed up Earth, and that I was made for heaven. I’m not. I’m just not. I’m not good enough for this Earth in that I am defective and terminal and damned to the inevitable fate of death far before I should be.  I’m messed up enough that if someone took away my cannula, I’d die. I’d die faster than you can recite the Rosary. Maybe not that fast, but you get the point. I’m obliterating myself and will ultimately eradicate anyone in my path that cares about me. My time is almost up, and I’ve been good for sixteen years, so I have some Christmas gifts I need to ask from you.

Santa, for Christmas this year, I’d like to be alive.  I’d like to feel excitement on Christmas Eve, and wake up to sit with my family in my pajamas on the floor exchanging gifts.  I’d like to put a Christmas sweater on my dog, Asher, one last time. I’d like to watch my dad’s face light up when he is shaking his gifts and inaccurately guessing what it contains.  I want to honor the stupid family tradition where we eat warm cranberry scones, and talk about useless stuff. I’d love to go to Christmas mass and fake-pray next to my grandma just to make her smile.  For Christmas I’d selfishly like to wish to breathe without my tank, and I’d like to shoot hoops without being winded or sitting in a wheelchair. I want my mom to be able to offend me or have an argument with me without feeling bad because she doesn’t want hateful words to be her last to me.  I want the other kids in the world who have been eaten alive by cancer to breathe and walk and function like they did pre-diagnosis. I want to go out with my girlfriend and make out on the couch without the tubes getting in the way. And there’s one more request I want to ask of you that you might have a hard time with.

My mortality and your immortality is one of many things that makes us different.  You have no limit, no approximated last day. You have eternity. For as long as your tradition is passed down to children, you will thrive.  I have about a month. For as long as I have had this diagnosis, I have desperately tried to ignore that fact. However, six months dwindled to three, which faded to two, which dissolved to one.  Now, here I am, and I have next to nothing left. Nothing, yet something. One of the most fascinating things in this world is how long a short amount of time is, and how quick an extended period of time passes.  You will never understand that. I started this letter intending to foolishly ask you for some of your years. Every ounce of my frail being wants to be healthy, but more than that it wants more years. You have an infinite number of those, which is too much, and I have only a twelfth of one, and that is far too little.  I wanted a trade and that’s all. It’s such an immature longing, but such a real and powerful one. It isn’t fair that you get so much time and I get so little. Is it too much to ask for some of the years you’ll take for granted? Because trust me they’re the most valuable things this twisted world has to offer.

I could ask for some of your years, or perfect health, or to have a normal life, but I’ve grown into this awful one.  I won’t tell you I like it, or that I’m not jealous of ordinary sixteen-year-old boys, but I am happy. Oddly enough, I have a new respect for life, and it’s because I’m not doing much living these days.  I tend to be in hospitals, visiting crying relatives, playing video games in the basement, eating takeout with my girlfriend, or sleeping. Not too much living going on. But this is such a beautiful world.  It is just so freaking beautiful. It’s not just the way it turns green in the spring and orange in the fall. It’s not just the way flowers bloom or babies cry. It’s the way she looks at me when I wake up from my anesthesia.  It’s my cousin telling me it won’t hurt too bad. It’s my mom making my favorite foods after every procedure, and fighting back tears every time she signs the liability waiver. It’s breathing in and out without pain, and swimming in the ocean.  The most beautiful part of this mystifying world is the people on it. Beauty is the way people interact and love and mourn and even die. It’s a cycle that never ends and that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You may be “immortal,” but old man, immortality is a mirage.  All things will come to an end and we will all be stardust again someday. Until then, we will be a part of the most beautiful thing mankind will ever know and that is each other. I might not have had much time to love the beautiful people in my life, but I am grateful to have gotten what I did, and to have been a part of this magnificent continuum.

One last Merry Christmas,

Alex