Goodbye to Christmas

For the moment, the artificial Christmas tree is aglow with white lights. Their fragile sparkle blurs across tinsel and imitation pine needles. The gold pear shines and there's a sheen of gold on the baubles made years back by my niece and nephew. There's even a brief warmth on the blank face of the wicker angel. But when I've finished writing this post, I'll turn off the lights, take down the decorations, dismantle the tree and put it away until next Christmas. I no longer wish to celebrate.

News of a friend's death reached me yesterday afternoon. It was sudden - he was on his way home from Skye where he's spent Christmas with his wife and a friend when illness and death overtook him. The day after he died I'd been wondering when he'd be home and online again - I didn't know that the answer was "never." There will be no more emails, no more poems, no more comments urging the value of liberty and the human spirit.

For me, 2009 has been a year of loss. The absence of friends marks this new year more than the uncertainties of the present.

I'm looking forward without much confidence. My vision for the future is a gloomy one: greater poverty and greater hatred - politicians and the press urging us to a frenzy of self-interest. I see thought discouraged, freedom curtailed, fear proclaimed as a sacred cause and armies sent abroad with bombs in the name of "peace". I fear for the language. I fear for the earth and all its people. It is not a future I wish to share.

Yet, in the early hours I had a dream. I thought I was awake. I lay in bed and there was a constriction about my chest, as though it was bound tight. My friends who had died were close and asked, "Do you want to join us?" I could see only faint reasons to say "no" - death seemed safer and friendlier than this perilous world. I thought of my responsibilities and paused. There are people I love who would grieve at my death, I think, as I grieve for the deaths of friends. Still the company of the dead seemed warm and pleasant. There would be stories to tell and laughter, I thought, and an end to struggle and worry. Yet despite that warmth I felt a small, dull urge to remain on earth and knew, reluctantly, that my place was still with the living.

I slid back from my dream into sleep. When I woke, hours later, it was daylight.

Constance

Suddenly a conversation came to an end.

That's what death is like. The friendship and the love are still there but we can't talk any more. Or rather, I can talk, but there are no replies.

For O-level, I studied Shakespeare's King John - not a play many people know. I found the character of Constance irritating. After the death of her son, Prince Arther (twee on the page but he tends to work well on stage), she is absorbed in mourning in a way few 15-year-olds could understand. When King Philip reproved her with the words, "You are as fond of grief as of your child," I found myself in sympathy. But bereavements have taught me to appreciate Constance's response:

"Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief."

When grieving, that sense of absence is the nearest thing to consolation. At least grief at absence allows the rehearsal of memories and values the person lost. But there's numbness too, if that's the right word - it feels being encased in plastic, like a toy kept pristine in a neat display of identical, undamaged toys. I walk, speak, smile, laugh, say all the almost right things, but I need that plastic casing - it keeps me at a distance. What would happen if it split?

In my head, I talk to you constantly - you who will never read this. I continue the conversation that ended, tell you what's happening, ask you questions and wait for your replies. In a shop, buying black for your funeral, I said, "You're not dead. You can't be. You're here." And then I asked, "Am I imagining you?"

I know you smiled. There was such a gentle laugh in your voice when you replied, "Of course."