Monday 24 December 2018

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.

6 comments:

  1. Merry Christmas, Happy 2019 - Alison.

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  2. Yes. For the first time in 50 years I bought 3 Christmas presents for my husband in July, and felt so smug and happy about them too...he died in November. I took them to the Salvation Army a week ago. T. H. White said that the pebble wears into the rock eventually, but I don't think it does. I think that boulder is going to be there. Bless you.

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    1. I am so so sorry - and bless you too. I suspect that the comedy that is human life does not come any blacker than this.

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  3. I hoard black trousers and occasionally, black jeans. Being of short stature, and with the accompanying short legs, I am in a probably irrational state of constant paranoia that I will not be able to buy them at the correct length (and thus not requiring spending a stupid amount to shorten) when they are needed to replace ones that are no longer serviceable.


    About 2 months or so ago I finally cleared a box that is one of many that have not been cleared since I moved into my current place, which was more than a couple of years ago now. In it I found a plastic bag full of random small gifts that I'd bought a very long time ago, over 15 yrs in some cases, for particular people, that I'd never, for various reasons including estrangement/ drifting away, never given to those people. I had a think about it, and decided to give most of them to charity shops, although there are one or two that I am not sure what to do with. It was an odd sort of trip into the past...

    It took me awhile to tame the reflex to want to share something online, an interesting article or bit of nonsense, with your bruvver online. But he is still in my thoughts, and sometimes it's as though he is around, just in a different way.

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    1. I wish he was, I hope he is, although I'd prefer the normal way. I just share things with him online anyway, because there's no reason to stop, once you reason that it's no more futile than many other things one does, particularly things on Twitter. Denis and my brother may be gone - and you have left the field, but at least in that forum there is still the comforting presence of Lord Blood.

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