The Leaving

about a funeral

The Leaving

She was dying now.

I’d seen people die before but I didn’t know how much administration was involved.

And I didn’t know that it was sometimes the person who was actually dying who had to complete all those bloody forms. 

It was like : before you go can we just have your signature here, here, here….and….just here. 

Maria, was the name of the dying woman, and her last visitors were helping her complete the paperwork.

In life she hadn’t been the most organised person. 

A bit like me, I suppose. 

Well no. Even more chaotic, or perhaps challenged. 

Not challenged like someone living with missing limbs. 

No: “Challenged” like when she began this computer game called “LIFE” she had skipped the part at the beginning where you choose which weapons to carry to have some kind of protection until you got hold of the ultrabazooka on level 12. 

“Challenged” as if nobody had given you a map of this world or explained the rules. 

Her father (my brother) killed himself when Maria was very young. I’m tempted to dig out his suicide note and re-read it to get me back to the moment when that happened but I’m thinking: no. I'm thinking: “No, don’t do that”. 

It’s a bit like being a character in a movie. I like to be the one who can persuade someone not to kill themselves and say, convincingly: “No, don’t do that.”

But once they've done it, once they've ended themselves you’re just an extra. A mourner at another grave.

You’re just “voices off”. I don’t like that. It reminds me that there was a time I could have done something to stop them. Even if there really, truly: wasn’t.

So Maria had that, her father’s suicide. Which is rough for someone’s kids. It’s hard to make sense of the world when you’re growing up, it must be even harder when daddy jumps ship. You’ll be wearing a T-shirt that says “WTF?” for the rest of your life. Even more so than the rest of us.

So she grew up and somehow got into a relationship with the father of her first child. I never knew him but he seems to have been a crazy person. Like, a clinically crazy person with a diagnosis and a second home in a locked psychiatric unit. 

The child was named Avon.

Avon pretty soon acquired an autism diagnosis. I liked Avon. I’ve spent a lot of my life working with people who “weren’t normal” so I probably favour that label in a person. After all, the world isn’t normal either. When he was really young it was quite difficult to communicate with him. He was very happy to try and engage with me and have a go but there were too many bits and pieces of language going on in each sentence. Concepts that didn’t belong to each other. 

He loved history but events got thrown into a liquidiser, so you’d have accounts of roundheads from the English Civil War battling the SS. 

It could be confusing, especially as they were delivered with characteristic “pressure of speech” so that your head spun around so much that when you tried to catch an entire sentence three more had arrived. 

Avon was followed by Valerie, Maria's second child. Valerie had a different father, a chap with no recognised psychiatric disorder. They married and it all went quiet for a while until they split up and both kids lived with Maria. She was a bit of a “free spirit” and the children inherited her disposition. Valerie at age 7, decided that she wasn’t convinced of her gender orientation and wanted to be referred to as “V”. I have no idea if the “V” was capitalised. Avon continued to be autistic and both children were strangers to regular school attendance.

Chaotic. Demanding. Eccentric. 

God, it must have been so tiring. Tiring for two parents, exhausting for one. 

And then she got cancer. On top of everything else she got cancer. And then she had psychotic episodes as a result of the meds she was on for her treatment. And for the next ten years it was a running skirmishes with cancer. 

Maria’s filing system:

Bank letters, gas bills and school reports were filed with holiday brochures and leftover sticky jam sandwiches. Now at the end, the time had come for paperwork to be finally sorted. Kind of an end of term report. Never put off important things until tomorrow because you might not get one of those.

The whole process of death is odd, I think. Maria had battled with death for years. 

Death had ravaged her body and hollowed her out. It had offered a guest appearance at all of her internal organs, each one playing a game of Whack-A-Mole with cancer.

But it wasn’t eternal.

It just seemed that way at the time.

Ian and I stood looking down at her and we simultaneously reached out across the crisp white sheets and held her hands. 

One hand each. Like with a wishbone.

Lying in her little bed in that little room she looked small, shrunken and colourless. Her face always had a roundness to it. She was never thin, but this was to be her last ever crash diet. There was little room for vanity about her body here. Faded blue nail polish on her fingers and tattooed flowers coiling over her arms were the last embellishments of living. 

It all goes away in the end.

Just then speaking, simply making sounds that could be understood was a trial for her. She could summon the energy to form a sentence but it was obviously a struggle and when the words came out they were distant and faint as if from the end of a long tunnel. This was unfortunate because Ian was partly deaf and relied on his electronic hearing aids. Getting Maria to repeat her words would have been cruel, so there was a lot of nodding and whispering going on. But sometimes, in quiet times, words aren’t really important.

Maria had lots of surgical and chemical interventions in her time, The full set, as it were. 

She’d also had a hip replacement a few months before all this dying-with-cancer business.

 It may have been the chemotherapy that rotted her bones and led to the decay in her hips. Just one of chemos amazing side-effects: It might keep you alive but it’ll eat your bones.

I’m old now, I had two hips replaced last year and it was hard : The stress of the operation, the nightmarish experience of the whole process and the long, awkward and embarrassing recovery. But today I walked my dog for miles and enjoyed the absence of pain. I’m counting the days when I can get back on my motorcycle. 

That’s what recovery is: Life without pain.

But fate had allowed Maria little time to benefit from all that palaver, all that fuss.all that anguish.

It takes a year after total hip replacement to fully recover.

She didn’t get that time. She didn’t get a year.I don’t even think she got half that. Not even six months.Oh the irony. 

Her oncologist was surprised that the cancer had returned. 

I’m not sure how that meeting would have gone. I’m not sure how the specialist must have felt. One day your patient is well on the road to recovery. 

Then one day she feels under the weather: tummy issues. 

She goes to her GP and she gets referred for some more tests and the tests reveal that she has weeks to live. Maybe days. 

Metastatic cancer cells are everywhere. Stage four. Boom. Just like that

What could her oncologist say? 

I mean “oops!” doesn’t really cover it. 

I’d really hate to have been that doctor:

 “Not only is my prognosis off by a million miles but you’re going to die at any moment.”

Her children sat with us in that little room in the hospice. 

(What is the correct term for that room? A departure lounge?) Her children had previously been told that their mother was going to a hospice, but as her cancer treatment and her hip surgery had meant their mother had frequent hospital trips they probably translated this final trip to “just another time we have to go see mum in that big white building with all that stuff in it until she comes back home”. 

Just another hospital visit where their mum rejoined them in maybe a week, maybe two.

But not maybe never.

They didn’t understand that she was going into somewhere that she wasn’t coming out of. 

It had to be explained a few times. 

Their silence indicated that they got it now. Mostly.

V asked to see her mother alone. 

Avon and I had to leave the room. I didn’t know why. 

It turned out it was to show her mum a dance that she had been practicing. She didn’t want to show the moves in front of the men. It was a personal thing. 

After the dance Maria asked to speak to Avon on his own so V and I had to leave.

 I’m not sure why. I don’t think dance was involved. 

I think Maria just wanted to make sure that Avon knew for sure that there was no coming back from all this. Avon’s autism sometimes meant that he didn’t get it. 

He really needed to get this now. Finally,

I was surprised that since the last time I had seen him Avon had shot up in height and had transformed into the appearance of his grandfather, my brother, the one who killed himself (well, I don’t mean he had a long grey beard or anything. I mean his appearance was like his grandfather when he was young.) I thought it was just me losing the plot about this but Ian agreed. He was the younger Keith. 

So Avon’s sister and I walked in the mysterious  grounds of the hospice. She acted as my guide, as she’d obviously done the grounds tour before. V seemed quite animated. Maybe she was just pleased to be away from things. Away from death for a little while.There were little gates along the path and she casually mentioned that the gates were tied closed. Indeed they were. Cable tied.

 “Does this mean we have to turn back? “ I asked

“No”. She gestured. “We can just jump over this wall” . 

I was conscious of her eyes staring at me. 

Waiting for me to say “Oh no. I don’t think so.”

It would, of course, have been the sensible thing to say. It was only seven months since the second of my hip operations so I had the perfect excuse. 

But I didn't make that excuse. How could I? I didn’t want her thinking that infirmity was an age related thing. Not today.

So we climbed onto the wall and jumped. 

V lept unconcernedly into the air and I swear that she spun around on gossamer wings and touched the earth with magical pixie grace. 

I, however, hit the earth with all the grace of a wounded hippopotamus. 

If I had known how far the drop was I would, of course, have made a different decision. 

When we returned to Maria’s room everything was qúiet. I looked at Avon and he appeared to be staring at the trees outside, but I guess he wasn’t. I guess he was staring into the air between him and the trees. And I think he finally knew for sure now that his mother was never coming home again.

Maria died at 2am on New Years Day, just about when the year changed from 2024 to 2025. The New Year had barely got in, closed the door and caught its breath. She wasn’t alone when she died because the hospice didn’t let that happen. Someone monitored her life signs until they stopped. 

It’s a hard thing to understand how such a small intake of breath, a tremor of a muscle, the beat of a heart can be so important.

 There are some big sounds in a life: The crying of a baby, a car running into a wall, the scream when your little toe inadvertently moves the furniture, but the little noises are the ones to listen out for. I once held a man who had thrown himself from a bridge but I knew that he wasn’t dead because I could hear the little noises of his broken ribs crackling when he breathed. I could  hear him panting for air. 

Not loud noises, but little noises always mean so very much of everything.

Anyway Maria had stopped making her little noises by 2am, January 1st, 2025.

She wouldn’t be making any more of them. 

On New Year’s Eve: I lay on my bed at home, miles away from the hospice .The noise of the fireworks and the laughter of the merry-makers slipped away into the darkness. 

I don’t think I was worrying  about Maria. People sometimes take a long time to die. I had already planned a return visit. 

But, still sleep evaded me.

In the morning Ian messaged me to say that she was dead.

The Funeral

Ian and I got there early, nobody else here yet so we explored the churchyard grounds. There had been more snow here, much more so than at home.  Here and there it had been gathered up into huge drifts to help keep these strange little twisty roads clear. As we followed the footpath uphill we startled a gang of foraging squirrels who exploded into the undergrowth. 

It was a pleasant sort of day, if there could be such a thing for such a day. 

It was forecast to be rainy but it was not. The sun was out and the sky was clear.

Gravestones are funny things: Victims of fashion. You’d never think about fashion with something as permanent as a gravestone, but a lot of these new graves have photographs of their occupants. I mean, not of their occupants now, but of their occupants when they were smiling and healthy and dressed in their finest. I don’t suppose that when the picture was taken anyone said “‘ere Sammy, let's take another one for when you’re deceased”. 

No, they were probably taken when they were at the pub ogling the barmaid or crocheting a tent or something and death seemed a long way off. Which normally it is.

So photographs on gravestones are current fashion. I suppose holograms will be next. Add a bit of ai and you can end up having a conversation with a dead stranger while you walk the dog in the churchyard. Maybe that’s what ghosts are. Ghosts from the future. 

Probably not.

I remember walking through the little village of Escomb.  A Saxon church is there with all its ancient dead, where the only decorations on some headstones are: skulls and crossed bones. 

And a bunch of words. Latin words as the old graves came way before the church recorded anything in English for the benefit of the peasants.

Of course they didn’t have Google back then so unless the memorial mason had seen one he wouldn’t know what a skull looked like, so these skulls didn’t exactly look anatomically correct. Not even slightly. So the skulls look like half-carved pumpkins. 

(Or a turnip as I don’t know if they had pumpkins back in the seventh century.)

All changed now. Not sure if those photos on today’s headstones will last as many centuries, though.

So we walked the grounds and took in the view, which was rather pretty with sweeping hills and a herd of Yorkshire sheep nonchalantly going about doing sheepy things. Then, lost in thought as we were, we barely noticed the arrival of the other cars and then we felt it was time to join the throng and stop bothering the livestock. It's a truism, of course, that there are lots of people that you only get to see at weddings and funerals. And one day, of course each one of them will be centre stage at one of those events.

We gathered and there was a respectful murmur between strangers until the time came for the service to begin. It was a humanist affair. Most of the services I’ve been to lately have been one of those.

 I’m not sure what sort of service I’d choose: But I do know that a Viking Longship would be a logistical nightmare.

There was no singing of course. Despite this I wasn’t aware of anyone nodding off. There was a slideshow of Events in Maria’s life. A choice of songs that she’d liked: the Levellers was a favourite. And between all that there was the polished wooden box that contained her body. Well I assume it contained her body but nobody checked as far as I’m aware.

And then we filed out, some were crying and most were just quiet.

“The purpose of this gathering confuses me. My thoughts are not for her but for myself. I keep thinking: how empty it will be without her presence” Star Trek : The Next Generation

And that’s what it is, I suppose. It’s hard to walk out of the door and leave behind the thought: “I will never see this person again. Not ever. Everything they were, their voice, their laughter, their hugs, their humanity will be gone from me.”

And then we all adjourned to the pub. I think it’s traditional. Like in “Hitchhiker’s Guide” : 

And why not: the end of someone's life or the end of the world. Both events are best seen through the bottom of a glass.

And then I spotted President Donald Trump.

He was just across the road and staring through the window at us. As I was wearing the wrong spectacles all I could see at first was the red MAGA cap. I peered closer.

A young voice shouted “It’s not really him, it's a dummy. Last week it was Batman”

It was Avon’s voice, Maria’s eleven year old autistic son. I scraped up a chair and sat beside him. 

And we started a conversation. Well, I’m not too sure whether it was a conversation in the classical meaning of the word. That would be a little like describing the eruption of Vesuvius as a bit of a light show. Being how he is, trying to follow his stream of thoughts is like trying to catch machine gun bullets in a butterfly net. 

Well it used to be like that. For some reason it didn’t seem like that now. Maybe he’d just got older or maybe I have just become a little madder. His speech was no less chaotic than it used to be, but it was less full of incoherence. You just had simply to follow where he was going with all his sentences as they uncoiled and zipped around the furniture.

Most of what he was saying made sense and most of the references he made were factual references. Previously his sentences ran away with themselves and we ended up with the accounts of roundheads battling Samurai warriors. The connections weren’t there. But now time has passed. The connections now appeared to be there, provided you could catch them in time. 

I’m not sure how long we talked for but I think it was a long time. I think he made the misapprehension of thinking that I was doing him a service by spending time with him, but actually no: he was doing me a service because I no longer felt like a stranger who had to force himself to socialise with all the big people. 

I wasn’t working, I was communicating. 

In the end, when I had to go we hugged a few times and he thanked me for spending time with him.

 It felt good. Later his stepfather emailed me to say that he thought it would be a positive thing if we could spend time with each other. Avon had told him that I was one of his three favourite people. (I’ve no idea who the other two were). 

And that was it. Funerals can be strange places.

How do you feel about life after funerals? 

I think I started out being ambivalent about the subject but now not so much. Things have happened. Nothing earth shattering. No spectres in bedsheets or headless horsemen. Just random but seemingly connected things. 

Inconsequential things.

After the funeral I got back home and I noticed that some electrical wires were dangling from bookshelves in the lounge. The wires were connected to LED lights: little decorative lights.

 I made a mental note that I’d buy some cable clips the following day. 

For the dangling cables. 

As I knew that we had none of those. 

We’ll need to do a shopping trip tomorrow: Mental note.

 I just said that, didn't I?

I’m repeating myself to myself now. That'll be the stress. 

The following day I opened the door to the garden and I stood blinking in the daylight.

There, just in front of me, right in front of me on the ground, was a small packet of cable clips,

Open, and with the contents spilling out like stars.