What a lesser-known Charles Dickens Christmas story teaches about loss, via SpencerKlavan.
That year, Dickens published his last Christmas novella. Everyone knows his first one: A Christmas Carol set the tone for the holiday ever afterward. Less familiar than Scrooge’s redemption, though, is the later fable of The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. It’s a story about grief.Dickens’s imaginary perfect Christmas quickly became the standard image of the season: thick-fallen snow, warmth overflowing from a busy hearth, and the aching sense of a sweetness that will be gone too soon.
And why not? “If there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of antidotes ... use them?” asks Redlaw. “If there be poison in my mind ... shall I not cast it out?” But poison mixed with blood doesn’t draw out so easily, and loss mixed into a human life is harder still to separate from joy. His suffering forgotten but not gone, Redlaw slowly loses touch with all compassion and delight.
And the ghost’s bargain is certainly on the table. Not content with administering medication to quiet the voices of grief, some scientists are trying to develop ways of erasing bad memories from the brain altogether. Tempting, tempting. It’s the whole point of the thing, the reason why we can’t feel Christmas joy without Christmas sorrow. The two are bound together, as the child born in Bethlehem with songs of angels must one day go to the cross. It is what he came for.
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