When We Are Facing A Different Type of Christmas

I know this season is not always easy

Every December 1st, come what may, for the last six years, a package has arrived at my house. Inside the brown paper was a Christmas box, and inside that there were dozens of individually wrapped gifts. There was also a lot of Christmas confetti, and fake snow – packets of the stuff – to my daughter’s absolute delight.

Each year since Wendy Mitchell and I published her first book Somebody I Used To Know in 2017, she would send my daughter a Christmas box to help her get excited about the festive season. This is because Wendy loved Christmas, she loved the lights, the songs, the buying of gifts, the wrapping, everything. Each individually-wrapped present that she selected for my daughter would be something sweet to eat, or a Christmas decoration-making kit, or a bit of festive stationary. Here are some photos of some of the boxes she sent over the years:

Last year – which would be Wendy’s last Christmas – she thought Gracie was getting too old for all these little silly gifts, but as it was tradition and my daughter like most tweens is into skincare and make-up, she went to Superdrug and bought dozens of little presents: face masks, make-up brushes, cotton wool, body wash, nail files and of course, chocolate gold coins. My daughter was, of course, thrilled.

I filmed the opening of these boxes every year and sent them to Wendy so she could be part of the excitement. It was our thing, our tradition. But of course, Wendy is not here this year, there was no Christmas box on December 1st.

I miss my friend and think of her every day since she died by voluntary stopping eating and drinking (VSED) in February this year. In the months before she died, not only when I knew she was dying and she had set a date(ish), but before that, when we discussed assisted dying and her wishes, I asked her to make a plan with me of how we would haunt each other in the event of one of us dying before the other. I told her that I would appear as a robin and she would know it was me because I would poo on her. She laughed and said, no she would know it was me because it would be late, ever disorganised even in the spirit world – she knew me well.

I asked Wendy how she would haunt me, and she said simply that she would appear when I most needed her. And so I have waited, knowing that she would stick to her promise, and she has.

Wendy this time last year when I took her on an adventure to the British Museum

I’ve been working on an idea for my own memoir recently, and in my head it looked really good though I was terrified about putting pen to paper, of it not living up to my expectations which is so often the way. I wouldn’t say I was suffering from writers’ block, but where to start? For me I always need the start to get going, I can’t just start writing a scene, or from the middle, it has to be the start of the book for me to get the tone and then I’m like one of those little cars that you pull back and off it shoots. I was putting it off and putting it off, and then came Wendy’s voice, just when I needed her most:

‘Just pretend that you’re writing it for me,’ she said.

So simple.

And so right at that moment, I started writing, and it came so easily, as if it had been waiting there the whole time.

This isn’t a book about Wendy – though I told you in this post that I had put together a proposal about our friendship, as she had asked me to, and that it went out on submission to publishers back in the summer to no avail. I explained in that post how Wendy had sent me an email six months before she died saying that she had tried to think what to leave me when she was gone, and what she had come up with was to grant me her permission to write a book in my own name about our relationship, an older woman and a younger one, who worked together and became firm friends, and how together we found a way for her to escape dementia – neither of us had heard of VSED before we wrote that last book. But publishers have not been keen, apparently it may feel to them exploitative, even though the idea came from Wendy herself. I can understand that.

But I was thinking recently, there must be a way to tell this story that Wendy wanted me to. Perhaps fiction? A novella? Based on true life but perhaps fitted together in a slightly different way, semi-autobiographical, or auto-fiction. There was only one person to ask, so I handed that idea over to Wendy knowing she would give me a sign if she liked it, I was sure of it.

And she did. Of course she did.

Last night, completely randomly I opened my Audible library and decided to listen to my old friend reading her final book, One Last Thing - How To Live With The End in Mind. I turned off my light and lay in the darkness hearing her voice again and it made me really happy. Why had I not thought to do this before? I text her daughters to tell them how it had brought a smile to my face, I also told them I was thinking of them and that I knew this Christmas — their first Christmas since they lost their mum – would not be easy.

And like that I went to sleep, except in the morning, I woke up to a message from a friend who is facing an altogether different Christmas because his daughter has just been diagnosed with a brain tumour. He had sent a gorgeous photo of her, smiling as she held up the very same book I had gone to sleep listening to, and captioned it saying they had come across it on a hospital bookshelf. What a coincidence, I said.

Except I’m not sure I believe in coincidences. What I do believe in though are our friends who have departed, visiting and making themselves known to us ‘when we need them most’, just as Wendy had told me she would.

So I’m going to take those ‘coincidences’ as Wendy approving of this new idea of mine – I’ll have a think about it over the festive season.

My friend whose daughter has been diagnosed with a brain tumour wrote a beautiful post on Facebook the other day saying how their ‘normal’ has changed irrevocably now, how they can’t get back to the ‘before’, the bit preceding her diagnosis, the bit when all they had to worry about was the same old day-to-day concerns we all do. There will be lots of people out there, and maybe even reading this, who are facing a new type of Christmas this year, without those who were around last year, or facing a new normal with a disease they had not known about a year ago, or without a Christmas box to get them excited for what’s to come.

There will also be those for whom everything is the same this Christmas, and they will not know that this will be one full of ‘lasts’, they will take things for granted in that way we all do and perhaps should, but next year they will reflect back and realise they had no idea they were living a last back then – how they will wish they’d made the most of it while they could.

I’m not writing this to depress you, just as a reminder, it puts me in mind of that Chekov quote: ‘There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him--sickness, poverty, loss--and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well.’

I know Christmas can be a pain for some people, when you haven’t got money, or family, or you’re missing someone, but I think there are ways of finding a little bit of sparkle, like Wendy ensured we did with her novelty Christmas boxes each year, even if someone isn’t sending you a boxful of fake snow anymore.

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