It’s the experiences that make us rich. The time we spend with our family and our friends, that is the perfect gift, and it is all we need. Don’t get sucked in by endless adverts screaming BOXING DAY SALE, BARGAINS GALORE, LIMITED TIME ONLY. Just don’t. Call a friend instead. Take them out for a beer, ask them how they are, and really listen to their answer.

You can’t take possessions with you when you go, and while you’re here, they just weigh you down. Declutter and you’ll feel lighter, freer, less trapped. I will leave this earth with just the shirt on my back, and I’m OK with that, insofar as I can be. I am rich because I am loved. Show your loved ones how much you love them by investing your time, not your money. They’ll remember it, I promise.

Chapter Thirty-Six

My last Christmas on this earth is a fairly low-key affair. Energy-wise I am lacking; fatigue since the hospital is an ever-present ghost, weighing down my movements so I am sluggish. Even if I wasn’t tired, though, there is nothing I want to do more than sit around my parents’ house and spend the day enveloped in their love and the love of my friends. And James, of course. Always James. He doesn’t leave my side. I don’t ask him about his work, instinctively knowing he is turning down jobs to be with me and selfishly happy that he is doing so.

We decided against giving each other gifts this year, because really, what was the point? I am still getting packages in the mail almost daily from people up and down the country. While well meaning and appreciated, they are all opened and then gifted on.

I have an urgent need to make memories, not just for me, although I am starting to fixate more on what will happen to my memories after I am gone. But for my loved ones left behind. I am determined to gift them with enough memories to get them through the hard times ahead. My mother isn’t coping well with the thought of this being my last Christmas, so James and I become vagabonds for the holiday period, moving between houses. We deliberately spend most nights at hers, giving her the priceless gift that is time with her daughter. When we need a break or time alone together, we go back to Kate’s, where we can make love without worrying that my parents might hear through the walls. My bedroom is at the opposite end of the house from Kate’s master and Amanda’s room, so we are free to be as vocal as the occasion requires.

Determined to give my parents and James a Christmas to remember, we do everything Christmassy that I can think of, including a three-hour round trip to a Christmas tree farm so that we can have the perfectly shaped tree. When we get it home, it is so tall my father has to cut a foot off the bottom, and its girth is such that my mother has to make an emergency trip to the shop for more tinsel and another set of fairy lights, as the ones we have barely stretch to cover the artificial stick we normally drag out every year, let alone the monstrosity I have chosen to fill our lounge with for my final year. It is all worth it, though, because it is perfect. The sight of the tree lit up and the smell of the pine is so evocative of happier times that I decide, if I have to be buried, then I want to be buried in a pine box. I write this down but don’t tell anyone, not yet, because I don’t want to upset anybody else with the vision this conjures.