On Boxing Day, my family and I sat down to lunch with a few of my parents’ friends, among them a married couple I have known all my life.

I was more or less the same age as their daughter, so we were in and out of each other’s pockets, houses and lives, at that age when you’d be asked to someone’s house ‘for the day’ and not for lunch or supper.

Come 6 p.m., when it was time to go home, overcome by sudden bravado and that typically human over-indulgence and inability to call it a day, I’d happily accept their invitation for a sleepover, undoubtedly provoked by my and their daughter’s insistence.

In my family, sleepovers were allowed sparingly and never encouraged, but there were a few households which got the green light and this was one of them. At 8 p.m., when it was time to brush my teeth and slip into my flannel pyjamas, I’d suddenly panic, start to cry and beg to return home and eventually my parents would have no choice but to come and get me. This happened so many times it is etched in my memory and evidently in the memory of the couple who were having lunch with us, who decided to share the anecdote.

Someone present remarked that all these years later, I have not changed. I still find it impossible to sleep anywhere except my bed unless I am overseas and returning is an impossibility. Otherwise wherever I am, whoever I am with, however late it is, I will get up and find my way home. And it’s not just about my aversion to roughing it, for even on the occasions my girlfriends plan weekend breaks, in five-star comfort which boast heavenly beds, try as I might, I invariably leave the room at an unearthly hour and find my way back home.

I try to avoid sharing my bed, and when I can’t, I share it reluctantly, uncomfortably and for the most part with a man who is 10 and happens to be my son. I have never shared a bed long enough for me to get used to it. And the longer I live, I know, the unlikelier I am to change my sleeping habits. It’s something I recently found myself worrying about.

You may be wondering why I am taking you into my bedroom, letting you be privy to my odd ‘bedside manner’ but it’s that time of the year when we all think about change. The new year instils in each of us a feeling of hope, a commitment to self-improvement, a desire to change ways we are secretly unhappy with or worried about. For some it’s working habits, for others their waistline or an addiction or vice they are struggling with.

I think our own private resolutions undergo little change and each year they are brought forward from the previous year, like a bad debt that won’t go away. And most of our afflictions, if you like, are rooted in our past, inherited from our childhood, from a time we don’t even remember.

I was going to say that people don’t change. But perhaps they do. Although I suspect it is death and not the new year or the comfort of many more that changes people. We lost another of my parents’ close friends to cancer a few days before Christmas. As with the other couple, Vicky Zammit Cutajar was another fixture of my youth.

There are people who stand out from your childhood. Through the eyes of a six-year-old having her first Holy Communion, which is probably my first real recollection of her, and every year after that as I grew up watching her dynamism and ever-changing hairstyles and wardrobe, she left a lasting impression on me.

You grow up with an imaginary picture of what a mummy should look like. Vicky didn’t look anything like that. Then again, I think we are immune to our parents’ beauty in the same way that we are immune to our children’s faeces and vomit.

In the early 80s, when I was growing up, with her Twiggy blonde hair which went from very long, to spiky short and then long again, her red lipstick, the mountains of jewellery that lived on her dressing table, her glamorous wardrobe which we’d secretly rifle through when she was away, Vicky was beautiful and iconic - a ‘Madonna’ of her generation. I remember the strangest things about her – her initial fear of driving which she eventually overcame;her laughter which was loud andinfectious.

‘Very rarely, a few times in your lifetime, you open a book and when you close it nothing can ever be the same again.’ I think cancer is like that book. I am not sure whether cancer makes you like life better or whether it makes you a better person, but there’s something strangely liberating about the illness in as much as it puts life into its proper perspective. It bestows upon its victims a certain clarity which seems so elusive to the rest of us.

As her quality of life deteriorated steadily, losing first her sense of taste, then sight and finally her hearing, her passion for life seemed to increase in inverse proportion.

Months before, she’d plan and book holidays, concert tickets, season membership passes, when she had every reason to doubt she would live long enough to enjoy them. She was a lesson to all of us who watched her fade away slowly. Saying goodbye is always hard, which is why the end of the year is a poignant time for all of us. But we need to sign off the year to start a new one.

Life, the unstoppable conveyor belt of all things good, bad and fatal waits for nobody. Like Benigni’s film, I think Vicky stole each of our hearts in some way and reminded us all that life is indeed beautiful and precious.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com

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