The love and loss of Boris: Di Morrissey’s Christmas sadness
From sun-soaked beach days to festive celebrations with all the trimmings, I’ve marked the yuletide season in many different ways. But this year I’ll include a new tradition – raising a toast to Boris.
Last year, Christmas was hard and sad.
Boris, my partner of 25 years, was dying.
He had no pain, just frustration and the knowledge that a massive brain tumour was sucking away his days, our life together.
It was a terrible waiting.
It didn’t feel like Christmas.
We’d always felt so lucky that we’d found each other again, 30 years after we first met. I was 15 when he first asked me to dance at a staff Christmas party at the film studio where my mother was working as a film director. Boris was handsome and had a faint Croatian accent. A photographer took a picture of us as we made our way around the dancefloor gazing into each other’s eyes.
The memory of that Christmas party never left me.
Nor he.
When I was a child, Christmas was a small event that crept slowly, modestly, into my earliest memories. New books to read! The best gift ever, too quickly devoured.
My mother and her husband, whom I naturally assumed to be my father (but wasn’t… I was 21 before I knew that) and my baby brother, Michael, lived in a simple house in wonderland. Well, so Lovett Bay, NSW seemed to me then, what with Ku-ring-gai National Park as my backyard, our little jetty where I caught fish for my cats, and had a joyously uncomplicated lifestyle.
When I was almost 10, my stepfather and baby brother drowned near Scotland Island and our lives changed dramatically.
Chips Rafferty, our actor friend from Pittwater, raised a fund to pay for Mum and I to go to America to stay with her sister for several months. Mum did a TV course and I tried to adjust to American junior high school.
Back home, my mother started in radio on 2CH and we moved to small flat in a large home on Mona Vale beach until she got a war service loan to buy a little fibro house opposite the Mona Vale golf course.
Going from housewife to film director at Artransa Park Studios near the Blinking Light in Frenchs Forest was a massive leap for her. From being the strong and efficient woman-in-charge of an all-male crew, at weekends she retreated to housework chores and our garden, refusing to socialise.
Our Christmases were no big deal, but I was happy. We walked down our road which ran onto Mona Vale beach and spent the day sitting under an umbrella reading and eating ham sandwiches followed by Big Sister fruit cake. Friends and neighbours at the beach would stop to chat and gossip a little.
Once, Mum had a boyfriend and I was presented with his Christmas gift – plastic beach sandals and a beach towel. The sandals were several sizes too small for me, and I loathed the pattern on the beach towel. I asked Mum to stick to books. The boyfriend evaporated.
I’d left school at 15 as Mum couldn’t afford university, and so I was modelling and acting and at a bit of a loss about what to do with myself.
The lust for reading led me to the dream of writing. So Uncle Jim, Mum’s foreign correspondent brother, helped me get a journalism cadetship on the Women’s Weekly.
Four years later, in my early 20s, I moved to London to work on the Daily Mail in Fleet Street.
I have few memories of those Christmases in London, except once seeing snow flutter along Regent Street, having drinks with friends in a warm pub, while Mum was on the beach with the next-door neighbours – “Aunty” Glad and “Uncle” Al who ran the general store.
After five years, the British weather got to me. I headed home via Singapore to visit Uncle Jim who was working for the ABC in Malaysia. I had kept in touch with an American, Peter Morrissey, who I’d met in Europe on the way to London. We arranged to meet for dinner in Singapore.
Dinner lasted several weeks.
By the time I got home, I had a beautiful engagement ring on my finger. We married in Sydney, had our honeymoon in Sumatra where he’d been in the Peace Corps, and settled down in Hawaii for three years until I qualified as a US citizen.
Our first Christmas together was celebrated with his family in Walnut Creek (across the bay, in San Francisco) and we brought Mum over to share this special first family Christmas together.
Peter’s family – Dorothy (Dottie) and Bill (Baba) Morrissey – were warm, caring, generous and fun but, after the casual Christmases of my childhood, Mum and I found the Walnut Creek Christmas a bit overwhelming. The big, decorated tree in the playroom, the pile of presents, the food, the turkey centrepiece on the formal dining room table, everyone dressed in fancy new clothes, the cocktails, the extended family, endless friends and visitors.
My mother’s laughter was forced, and I remember my new husband anxiously asking if she was ill. I didn’t know how to explain that lazing on the beach with a ham sandwich in companionable silence now seemed very appealing.
Over the years, Mum would mention that’d she met Boris swimming at Mona Vale rock pool and he was married, that he had five kids. He always asked after me and Mum told him I was married with two children and lived overseas with my American diplomat husband.
Peter and I were posted to many different US embassies and moved country every few years. Christmas was celebrated fairly lavishly among the “dip corps”.
One year, Mum came to stay with Peter and me in Georgetown, Guyana. We told the children that Santa would be coming by on Christmas Eve, before they went to bed. Nicky, who was then three, was beside himself as he waited, clutching a small toy Santa figure. Santa was running very late and we were all anxious but then came the “ho ho ho”-ing.
Nicky opened the door to find a six-foot-tall Guyanese Santa, his beard and hat askew on his rasta dreadlocks, rolling drunk from all the rum pressed on him from families he’d visited earlier in the night. Little Nicky was not convinced that Santa was actually a wannabe Bob Marley!
My dream to write had never faded and diplomatic life began to smother me.
I separated from Peter and moved back home to Sydney where I took a job in TV and embarked on a new relationship only to find years had evaporated and the kids were heading to college. And still no book.
I walked out again and disappointed Mum by moving to a shack in Byron Bay. It was a solitary existence but I wrote nine books there. The kids adored the shack and Byron-back-then when they visited while on holidays from college in the US. Christmas in Byron was a casual smorgasbord of visitors, friends, the beach and the big new pub.
Then fate stepped in. One Christmas at a dinner party in Byron I met a fellow who looked familiar from Mum’s film studio where he’d worked as an animation artist. It clicked.
“You’re Boris’s brother,” I said. “How is he?”
Zoran smiled. “Boris is divorced.”
“Give me his number!”
We re-met at Mum’s house in Avalon. In the years since his divorce, Boris had been too shy to ask Mum where or how I was.
We shared our lives for the next 25 years.
On our first Christmas together, he handed me the photograph taken of us dancing at Mum’s studio. He’d kept it (in a sock drawer?) all these years.
We lived in Byron for 10 years until we moved to the Manning Valley where I was born.
I did Christmas Walnut Creek-style every year, whether his or my kids and grandkids were with us or not.
But last year Christmas was not the same.
My son came with his family from the US and my daughter and her children drove from Sydney.
Despite the laughter of children, the beautiful tree, and Boris making an effort to smile, it was not Christmas as usual.
By March, after a sudden blacking out and a fall, Boris was gone. An unfillable hole in my life ripped open.
This Christmas will be different. I have adopted my daughter’s old dog for company, and Nick and his crew will be with me for Christmas, while Gabrielle and her kids will be in the US with Peter this year.
I will do the usual tree, Christmas decorations, stockings along the mantelpiece, raise a glass to Boris . . .
. . . and wonder what the new year will bring.
Happy Christmas to you.
