Better

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• December 17, 2025

Joan Rivers, a legend in comedy, famously said about life, “listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But it doesn’t get better. YOU get better.”

I’m unsure that’s true. Not to say I’m accusing Joan Rivers of lying. I think there were few people as honest as Joan Rivers. But I don’t know it’s true of me, or even most people. What age has offered me is a growing apathy. Apathy is a freeing path, but I doubt it has any righteousness. Inner peace comes at the cost of cutting of concerns of anything out of your control. Which is almost everything. Is enlightenment merely a synonym for callousness? If so, is the cynic just a grumpy version of Gandhi?

While I am usually able to find a glistening silver lining like garland on a delightful Christmas tree around the holidays, not everyone loves the holidays. In fact, the merry-merry of those around them, or the constant reminder of movies and television programs to be grateful just makes them feel worse. A cloud of guilt consumes them, worsening a dampened, if not straight up depressed attitude. Life doesn’t feel better than the days of yore and neither do you. I know, because I’ve been there before.

Personally, I use the holidays as a welcomed distraction from my existential dread, from looping about my year and how little I’ve accomplished, how I’m going into the new year worse than the year before, and the year before and the year before.

My aunt Cathy, one of the warmest people I know, lost her mother during Christmastime many, many years ago, before I even existed. It’s a grief I can hardly imagine. The loss of my mother frightens me more than my own death. There is simply never a good time to lose the people you’re closest to, but Christmas seems worse… a lot worse. And yet, Cathy is a like if Christmas was a person. A cookie baking, gift wrapping, decorating elf like no other, Cathy did not let grief steal away her favorite holiday like the Grinch, but instead uses the holiday as a celebration of love and life. Now, I didn’t know her mom, but knowing her, I can say with a certain confidence that this is exactly what her mother would have wanted. She wouldn’t want her to be blue, feeling empty, but rather fill herself with love so much that she’s overfilled and must pay it forward to others. Love transcends physical forms, I truly believe.

If you’re stuck in a Scrooge mindset, unable to lift yourself out of a humbug without the help of spirits in the night, I’d say find some solace in the fact that you’re not alone. Don’t compare yourself to the divine. You are human. Fallible to the frightening woes of failure.

Christmas time is also a time of sickness. I mean that quite literally. Flu season is in full throes as Father Winter extends its claw like hands, evidenced in the bare trees reaching for the lack of sunlight. Germs pass from child to child, and then unto the adults who have a harder time recuperating. Sickness sucks, in every way, even the more minor afflictions. But nothing, and I mean nothing, will make you appreciate your health as a daily win than getting your ass kicked by something not even visible to the naked eye.

This year alone, I’ve missed out on a friend hang because someone was sick, and didn’t get to see my dear Aunt Cathy while in Florida because she had COVID— the unwanted gift from Hell that keeps giving. It’s no fun when plans you looked forward to get nipped. But these are life lessons also. To not wait. Don’t wait for one time of the year to see people. Don’t wait for one card to say, “I love you.” Don’t wait for these perfect moments, because perfect moments so seldom exist.

Just as a dead Jacob Marley warned, “the clock tolls for all.” Death itself, though dreaded by the sane, is no evil entity. You may become a better person when you acknowledge your fallibility. Your finite place in this world. What if I told you that you had four Christmas’s left. Would it change how you lived your life starting in the new year? How you treated others? How you made use of your time?

When you’re sick in bed with a the flu, a stomach virus, or something more serious and you swear you’ll eat healthier, be healthier, be better, how many of us are? How many of us actually become better when we swear to it when we’re weak? Or is pain so quickly forgotten?

I’ve found physical pain is. It is forgotten when you’re out of it. But emotional pain lingers, and scars, and you manage to live with it, for worse or for better.