Absent Friends

 Marjorie & John Somers Cocks

 

Lee & Elizabeth Hardy           

If yours is the sort of family that engages in toasting the likelihood is that over Christmas you will have raised a toast to absent friends. In a family context absent friends is generally a euphemism for close and sometimes not so close relations. But to mourn someone's absence you have to have known them and not everyone sitting down to Christmas lunch will have known those that are called to the minds and hearts of others sitting around them.

I was fortunate enough to have had both my grandmothers figure prominently in my life into adulthood and can readily and pleasurably recall numerous Christmases spent with each of them. Their influence on me was marked although they were chalk and cheese. One a disciple of duty who worked for MI6 during the War and the other a raconteuse who lived for leisure, fashion and entertainment.

Unfortunately, by way of contrast, I knew neither of my grandfathers, one of whom died when I was 2 and the other nearly twenty years before I was born. I've sought as I've grown up to get a sense of the men they were but that sense is, of course, almost entirely dependent on the recollection and accounts of others, primarily my parents.

Obtaining those accounts depends to a very significant extent on time, energy and inclination and even the most minute account necessarily only conveys the idea of a person. One of the chastening discoveries of early parenthood is the realisation that as far as your child is concerned your life before their arrival is a matter of little consequence or even supreme indifference. The more curious children do of course want to learn more in time to fit the puzzle of their existence together. But as their parent you don't get to see that puzzle and therefore the possibility that their sense of a person, so vivid and real to you, is in fact wildly inaccurate or misapprehended.

Unless someone is really obtuse and dull it seems to me to be a near universal desire for people to try and understand who they are and where they came from, by which I don't mean from Milton Keynes but the nature rather than nurture part of themselves.

If you have a difficult relationship with your parents and you did not know theirs it's worth trying to know more about that relationship. But, more importantly, it's worth trying to imagine that relationship. I don't necessarily subscribe to the maxim that to know all is to forgive all but so often, in my experience, with understanding comes at least forbearance. At the very least when we try to imagine the childhood of others we are exercising empathy and sometimes a little empathy can stitch even the greatest rifts.