Christmas is hard the first year after you lose someone. For Elton John, Christmas 1991 came just a month after the death of one of his closest friends, Freddie Mercury. What happened that day became one of the most tender stories Elton has ever told.
Sharon and Melina
Elton John and Queen’s Freddie Mercury were two of the biggest showmen in rock music, and offstage they were close friends who loved to laugh together. Years earlier, they had given each other playful nicknames, the kind only close friends use. Elton was “Sharon.” Freddie was “Melina.”
A secret shared between friends
In his 2012 book Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss, and the End of AIDS, Elton wrote that Freddie told him he had AIDS not long after he was diagnosed in 1987. For years, Freddie kept it private and kept working with Queen even as his health failed. Elton was one of the few people who visited him during his last months.
The public only learned the truth at the very end. Freddie Mercury announced that he had AIDS, and the next day, November 24, 1991, he died at his home in London. He was 45 years old.
Three days later, on November 27, a small private funeral was held at West London Crematorium. Only about 35 close friends were there, including Elton John and Freddie’s bandmates in Queen.
A knock at the door on Christmas Day
Weeks passed, and Elton was still grieving when Christmas Day arrived. Then a friend turned up unexpectedly at his door. In his hands was a package wrapped in a pillowcase.
Elton opened it. Inside was a painting by Henry Scott Tuke, a British artist from the late 1800s and early 1900s whose work Elton loved and had been collecting. Freddie knew that. With the painting was a handwritten note:
“Dear Sharon, I thought you’d like this. Love, Melina. Happy Christmas.”
Freddie had chosen the gift while he was dying and arranged for it to reach his friend on Christmas, knowing he would not be there to hand it over himself.
“Crying like a child”
Elton wrote that he was overwhelmed. He was 44 years old, and he broke down and cried like a child. Thinking about how ill Freddie had been in those last weeks, he summed up what the gift meant:
“He had somehow managed to find me a lovely Christmas present.”
To Elton, it was proof of the kind of person Freddie was. Even in death, he wrote, Freddie reminded him of what made him so special in life: he always thought about other people.
Keeping Freddie close
Elton did not forget. In April 1992, he joined Queen and a long list of stars at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium. That same year he launched the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which became one of the world’s leading organizations fighting the disease that had taken his friend.
The painting stayed with him, too. In a 2019 interview, nearly three decades after that Christmas, Elton said the Tuke painting still stood on its easel in his home. And the pillowcase it arrived in had never left him:
“I still have the pillowcase next to my bed.”
Some gifts are remembered for what they cost. This one was remembered because a dying man used his last weeks to make sure his friend would still feel loved on Christmas morning.
Leave a Reply