The Chair That Never Fills

 Christmas is two days away, and the house already knows it.

It hums differently at this time of year. The walls seem to hold their breath, waiting for voices they’ve heard a thousand times before. The kitchen fills with smells that feel older than me—food that tastes like tradition, like memory, like something passed down whether you asked for it or not. Chairs are pulled out, plates are counted, cutlery is lined up with care.

And then there’s the chair that doesn’t move.

There’s always one chair that never gets pulled out, never scraped across the floor, never claimed by a body. It sits there quietly, like a fact no one wants to say out loud. An absence so familiar it’s almost invisible.

Almost.

I’m twenty years old, and absence is the first thing I learned about family.

My uncle has been in prison for thirty-five years. I have only ever known him through visits and phone calls—through plastic chairs bolted to the floor, through voices distorted by crackling lines and time limits. I don’t know what it’s like to sit next to him on a sofa. I don’t know what his laugh sounds like when it isn’t filtered through concrete walls. I don’t know how it feels to have my uncle ruffle my hair, tease me, embarrass me, or show up when I need him.

I know his absence better than I know his presence.

When he was arrested, he was given an eight-year tariff. Eight years. That number was supposed to mean something. It was supposed to be a promise, or at least a boundary. Eight years until he could come home. Eight years until life could begin again.

I didn’t exist yet. I wasn’t even an idea.

Thirty-five years later, he’s still inside.

Try to understand that. Try to really sit with it. Eight years turned into thirty-five. A sentence stretched and twisted until it no longer resembled justice at all. Until it became something else entirely—something slow, grinding, and quietly devastating.

People love labels. Prison is full of them. Offender. Inmate. Risk. File number. My uncle has worn many of them over the years, none of them telling the full story, none of them explaining what was stolen from him—or from us.

Because something was stolen.

I never got the uncle I was meant to have. Not the one who comes over on Christmas, not the one who watches films too loud or falls asleep halfway through them, not the one who tells stories I’ve already heard but pretend are new. I never got the kind of relationship people take for granted, the one that just happens because time and proximity allow it to.

He never got to watch me grow up. Never saw my awkward stages, my small victories, my mistakes. Never stood in the background of my life, quietly proud, quietly present.

And that loss doesn’t show up on any paperwork.

People talk about fairness like it’s abstract. Like it’s theoretical. But unfairness lives in the body. It lives in empty chairs and unanswered questions and a constant, dull ache that something fundamental is missing.

And we aren’t the only ones.

There are families everywhere like mine. Families who were told, It won’t be forever. Families who marked calendars and counted down years that kept moving further away. Prisoners who were told they’d be home for Christmas—and then missed thirty-five of them.

Imagine that. Imagine being promised a future and watching it dissolve year by year. Imagine time becoming something done to you instead of something you live.

My uncle missed everything.

He missed birthdays. He missed funerals. He missed the quiet moments that make a family a family. And then, in the span of six weeks, the world took even more from him.

His dad died.
His Grand mother died.
His great-niece died.

Three losses. Six weeks.

And he faced them alone.

No arms around him. No shared grief. No chance to stand at a grave and say goodbye. He grieved inside a cell while we grieved outside, all of us broken in different ways, all of us knowing something unbearable—that we couldn’t reach him, and he couldn’t reach us.

That kind of suffering doesn’t rehabilitate anyone.

It doesn’t heal. It doesn’t teach. It just wounds deeper.

And that’s what makes me angry.

Because prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation. That’s the word they use, the one that sounds clean and reasonable and humane. Rehabilitation. Helping people change. Helping people return to society better than they were before.

But what I’ve seen isn’t rehabilitation.

What I’ve seen is people reduced to numbers. Files stacked on desks. Human beings treated like inventory. Prisons that function less like places of growth and more like warehouses—storage units for lives that have been paused indefinitely.

Release doesn’t come when someone is ready. It comes when someone else decides they’re convenient.

The parole board doesn’t always care what the judge said. That’s one of the quiet truths no one likes to admit. Tariffs become suggestions. Sentences become flexible in only one direction—longer. If the numbers need to look a certain way, people stay inside. If someone doesn’t want to take responsibility, a door stays locked.

I’ve watched this happen.

My uncle once had a parole officer who barely met with him. No consistent meetings. No real understanding of who he was, what he’d done to change, or how he’d spent decades trying to better himself. Then, a week before his parole hearing, suddenly she appeared—long enough to write a report stating she didn’t believe he was ready for release.

A week.

That was enough for her to decide his future.

What kind of system allows that? What kind of justice lets someone with no real relationship, no real insight, hold that much power over a human life?

That isn’t justice.

It isn’t caution.

It’s cowardice.

And I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

The system doesn’t need to be fixed. Fixed implies it works but has flaws. This doesn’t work. It needs an overhaul. It needs to be torn down to its foundations and rebuilt with humanity at its core—because right now, humanity is the first thing it strips away.

As we speak, someone could be dying in a cell. Someone’s family could be going about their day, unaware that their world is about to collapse. Checks missed. Duties ignored. Silence where there should have been care.

And still, the paperwork will be neat.

Still, the numbers will add up.

Christmas will come, like it always does. We’ll gather. We’ll laugh when we’re supposed to. We’ll remember when it feels safe. And we’ll leave space for the one who isn’t there.

I look at that empty chair and feel something deeper than sadness.

I feel mourning for a family I never got to have.

I mourn the version of my life where my uncle was there—where his presence was ordinary, unremarkable, and constant. I mourn the ease of it. The normality. The way it should have been.

I mourn his life, too. The decades lost. The moments stolen. The fact that his name is spoken more in waiting rooms than living rooms.

And I’m angry. Angry that this has been normalized. Angry that absence has become routine. Angry that families like mine are expected to carry this quietly, politely, without disrupting the narrative that the system works.

It doesn’t.

It breaks people. It breaks families. And then it asks us to be grateful for what little it allows.

So yes, there is an empty chair at the table.

But it isn’t just empty.
It’s heavy.
It’s loud.
It holds everything that should have been there.

And until something changes, it always will.