Death...
To listen to the spoken version of this post, please click HERE
It so happens that today is the 29th anniversary of my first lover's death - someone who fell foul of the plague that was doing the rounds then: HIV/Aids. Nowadays this is relatively controllable with modern drugs, but back in the late '80s it was more-or-less a death sentence.
That set me musing about his funeral - a lot of people I didn't know (we'd parted ways back in the '70s altho remained best of friends to the end) and a very emotional event, with people standing up to say a few words and being quite unable to do so. In general, I am not a lover of funerals and the events that surround them, but an elderly cousin's 'seeing-off' was a wonderful event, in that she'd left very precise instructions to her family (in a little black box). There was much humour in it (as well as sadness of course) and the younger generation had even rigged up a link to New Zealand, so one grandson could play the last post.
Perhaps the best funeral (slightly tongue-in-cheek) was another cousin's cremation service where I'd got the time wrong and we arrived just as they were coming out. Nobody seemed to notice. That said, we all decamped to the Friends Meeting House in Dorking for a very moving - and intense - 40 minutes of quiet remembrance, with the occasional person standing up to say a few words. All followed by a very English tea and cakes in the garden...
Another cousin had the misfortune to die during the recent lockdown and indeed his memorial is the next event in an otherwise empty diary: in July of 2021... lol
Enough of death and dying, although I do intend to spend some time thinking about that first relationship... perhaps nursing a glass of tolerable whisky.
Comments