No point in wishing my parents or stepfather a merry Christmas. Nor all my grandparents. For they’re all long dead now. But I wish they were still here.
I would love to see my dad, not when he was gravely ill in 2011, but as he was when he was 75 and younger. And my mum, pre early 1980s, before her health had been ravaged by cigarettes. I would love to see all of them in happier times. I would like to pick and choose their ages so there was no pain, no indignity of old age, no descent into the darkest of dark times.
I will not shed a tear for any of them today because, by and large, they had their lives and, with one or two exceptions, enjoyed full and long lives. In some cases, in failing health and ending up in institutions, life in the literal sense was all it was. It wasn’t really living. Only the most selfish part of me would want to bring any of them back from a time of suffering, a time of being kept alive purely for life itself. We are all, I know, different.
I never spent a single Christmas away from my mum and when she was gone I felt very lucky that I hadn’t. It wasn’t that she was better than anyone else’s mum, or that I was a better son. I just knew that as the years went by there would come a time when I wouldn’t get a choice in the matter, that later on I would visit a shell of the proud woman I once knew. I have learned you can never put a price on life, you cannot buy memories and you cannot bring back the past and do things differently.
If I had much of my life back again, I would have made more of an effort to see my dad at Christmas. He too has died and those years apart can never be brought back.
I am of the view that I will never see any of them again. I will not survive my death, nor they their deaths. When they died, it was final. They returned to where they had been before they were both, which is nowhere.
My memories of Christmas are, by and large, happy ones. Some are coloured sepia, some are perhaps a figment of my imagination seen through old photographs and some are very real.
Everywhere across our village and beyond people are with those who matter most and if they are not, they wish they were. My brothers are halfway round the world and all I can do is speak with them through Skype. It will do and it’s better than nothing but it’s not the same as being there.
I last spoke with my dad on Christmas Day in 2010 and I never saw him again. Skype was good but it was all over too soon and when it came down to it, we had spent our last special day thousands of miles apart. When he died, I made a silent vow to myself and to my family that from now on, every Christmas Day we would be together unless there were circumstances beyond our making that denied us the chance. Nothing is more important than family.
Not that any of them will know, but this drink is for you, my family who are no longer with me. The memories are now all I have but it is better to have memories of when we were together than when we were apart.
Here’s to absent friends.
