A few months ago, I turned 40. In the run up to the day, I was fairly ambivalent about it. It was just another year, and I am doing just fine thank you very much.
But a week before my birthday, we had a series of events that caused the bottom to fall out of our world. War and loss marked our lives in a way that it never had before.
And – in the margins of all this chaos – I started to mull about life before 40.
What struck me most was the absence of those I lost along the way to 40. Grandparents, friends, family members. And it wasn’t just their absence – people come and go in life – but the permanence of their absence, of death.
They were fixtures of years of our lives, and now they are gone. Permanently.
They leave behind a version of themselves – ghosts, fragments, memories, stories – that we can treasure. But they’re not here.
The war has made me want to talk to Grandad about the Blitz, sitting once more around that Orchard St dining table. The loss has wanted to take me back to long hours and late nights around backyard tables of my 20s. It has all made me miss a version of myself who didn’t have these losses.
Because that’s the point – this permanent loss seems to compound with age.
The impact of those who were here… but now are not. Of dining tables, of backyards, of playgrounds.
But the more you think about it, the more you realise that we are actually also born into this absence.
Our own parents carry their own absences, compounding over time. We will not know their losses and absences except as shades; as stories. Their own dining tables, backyards, playgrounds and memories of loss.
And, in the same way, my own children will not know my ghosts. They can never know Grandad. They can know about him – and they certainly will. But they cannot inhabit a memory of him as I can. That absence is my own.
As we sit around my own dining table, laughing over family dinner, my beautiful boys do not know what they do not know. They can never sit at that Orchard St dining table as I did. They will, in time, have their own absences. But they can never inhabit that Orchard St table.
And that, itself, is its own absence. And it is mine.
James Hills Writes 