The empty chair at the Christmas feast and the recipe for prune stuffing

IT IS more or less impossible to reach middle age without having experienced the sadness of the empty chair at this time of year. This was the first Christmas that we sat down for turkey without having to consider my mother’s wellbeing. She died in October, just a few days after her 85th birthday, a little more than nine years after suffering a cataclysmic stroke. She had the satisfaction – though not really aware of the fact – of spending a shade more time on this planet than her own mother, who died at a mere 84.

Mother outlived her husband by more than a quarter of a century and the memory of that first December 25 after father’s passing remains vivid. The empty chair was not physically put in place for him at the Christmas feast but certainly no one wanted to sit at the head of the table. That was where father would have been, carving knife cheerfully poised after its ritual sharpening, ready to set about the turkey and ensure that everyone had the cut off the bird they desired: ‘Brown meat or white?’

A few Christmases ago, we came through the yearning for Hermione’s father after he too in due course had made his sudden exit earlier in the year. A toast was raised to his memory – and to his continuing, though disembodied, presence in our lives. With so many of his loved ones gathered in the one place for the Yuletide rituals, that spiritual presence was all the more vivid while his actual absence was all the more marked.

The two men departed with frightening, convulsive suddenness, the first snuffed out by a heart attack and the second by complications arising from treatment for a malignant tumour. My mother, in contrast, executed the slowest of slow fades before shuffling quietly off this mortal coil with her customary minimum of fuss. There was no empty chair for someone who was unable to attend the annual feast for almost a decade while she endured her gradual decline. She was already long gone from us.

During that decade of inch-by-inch withdrawal, she and we had to make do with Christmas Day visits (sometimes the day after, I confess) to Room 218 of the nursing home where she resided in hygienic splendour. We sat at her bedside in the nursing home amidst the cards and the bouquets and the potted plants, as each year her mind became less connected to our world. And all the while her already cruelly restricted body closed down step after step after inevitable step until she was no longer able to do so much as to wipe her own nose.

Since she took her final breath, we who loved her have attempted to re-create the woman our mother was before being reduced to the shell of a person we sat with in Room 218. Her children spoke of her to the congregation at her funeral of the woman who hated come-all-ye ballads and loathed the songs of Frank Sinatra. We found that many of the memories we shared with those who came to mourn were of food – from the splendid roast beef dinners to the brown bread.

The more I think about her, the more I realise how little I knew about my mother for she was someone who never pushed her own agenda. Whenever she sat down at a piano in older age, she was once more the accompanist, her hands drawn to the hymns she rendered for choirs long since disbanded.

She was the ultimate support player, a secretary to some great man in her all too brief working life, then a loving wife and infinitely attentive mother. Now that she is gone, never to return, I ache to ask her the questions which never quite cropped up when she was alive, covering a broad sweep of family matters.

We never learned, for instance, what band was playing when she and father fell in love – what band and what venue? We shall certainly never know.

At least we have some of her recipes. Though there was no empty chair for her at Christmas dinner, she exerted a presence on the table. The prune and sausage stuffing so eagerly devoured was my wife’s variation on a formula which mother adapted from a stuffing of her own long deceased mother-in-law.

Thus we keep in tenuous touch with past generations, at Christmas more than at any other time.