Presents 3 - No Longer Needed

If you have lived somewhere where there are shortages or rampant inflation, you tend to get into the habit of buying things when you see them, usually getting multiples and hoarding, in case you never see them in the shops again. It is a neurotic impulse that is hard to break when you are back in a land of plenty, and for me it led on to a decades-long habit of buying presents throughout the year, in often absurdly early preparation (think January sales early) for Christmas. If I saw something lovely that I considered would be perfect for someone for whom I thought I would need a Christmas present later, I'd buy it and put it away, regardless of the date.

Not any more.

I've learned my lesson. Through sad experience, it has at last dawned on me that storing up things for the future is fairly pointless if that future never actually arrives.

The thing is, you lose touch with people sometimes. You move to a new place and somehow the bonds of friendship do not survive the added element of distance. Or you simply run out of things to say to each other. Or your friend's husband decides you are insufficiently woke and your friend decides it is easier to let things slide.

More jarringly, you are outright dropped, as in the startling case of my stepmother. I still have the book I bought for her that I thought would make a perfect Christmas present in 2008. It sits on an upper shelf, along with a few other presents, forlornly waiting to thrill recipients who will never appear. Unfortunately, between that book’s purchase and Advent, my stepmother mysteriously cut me out of her life. Even when my brother died, she did not bother to get in touch. He was her stepson, but apparently, despite our best efforts, we had inspired in her no longlasting affection.

And, speaking of my brother, that leads me to the saddest element of all that relates to presents - the impulse to buy things for someone who is no longer here to receive. The realisation that you have found the thing that would give most pleasure to someone that you love but that you cannot give it to them and they cannot receive it - that is one of the devastating ways that grief ambushes you.

It is just one element of the slowly growing awareness that missing someone is not a thing that passes, not a stage that you go through and emerge from eventually, unscathed. Missing someone, you finally recognise, is permanent. You don’t get over it; you only learn how to live with it. You make a space in your life, and it is filled by an absence. Although there is nothing there, it feels like a boulder, a huge dark heavy object always by your side.

And on that cheery note, a very happy Christmas to everyone and best wishes and great hopes for a peaceful, generous and kind world in the new year.