cw: death, dying, suicide

Day 30 - Dead Friends Club

We’re 3/4 of the way through Lent, so let’s look at death and dying and being dead. My grandmother Mopsy live to be 98, which is extraordinary, but then she died, which is the most ordinary thing anyone can hope to do. She was very ready to be rid of this life, I think, as in her final weeks she seemed unable to sleep, unable to find any comfort or relief. That side of the family spoke with great concern in a Messenger chat, and kept talking about something called The Driver. I was never very sure what the Driver was, except an agent of death. I assume it was something like an armful of morphine to slay my gran in a timely fashion, as if she was George the VI, hurried off this mortal coil in good time to make the morning papers. That’s the most likely meaning, but at the time, whenever I heard ‘the Driver’ I imagined Jason Statham as an assassin, posing as a chauffeur, who visits those who will not die, and ensuring their capture. Maybe nobody ever dies without a little help from the Driver. I don’t know. I’ve never witnessed death as a moment, only as a process.

When I first moved to Yorkshire in 2003, the part of the local dialect that threw me the most is the Yorkshire ‘while’. In most English, while is for an ongoing thing: I watched it while I ate. In Leeds and Sheffield, and likely in other places around here it means ‘until’, as in ‘I’m working while five’ or, in a strikingly grim sentence I once heard from a retiree, ‘my wife stayed in hospital while she died’, which makes the process of death feel inexorable, a slope to slip down into darkness, rather than the flick of a switch. It seemed quite wrong until I witnessed my grandmother in her final days. In a way it makes dying seem less binary.

I do have a few younger dead friends. My friend Alistair died of nothing at all! One day he just didn’t wake up. We weren’t terribly close. We went to the same church for a while, and one day, the evening that ‘Rise of the Cybermen’ was broadcast, we went together to a naturist swimming event in York, which was wonderfully refreshing and casual, after which bathing trunks and swimsuits always seem like a redundant apology. Alistair was extraordinary. We are similar in ways, and it would be zero percent surprise to me if he’d ever turned out to be autistic and non-binary in some magnificent way. He was a passionate Christian, and wrote worship songs which nobody else in the world would have made, like Brian Wilson at his most extreme, they came uncomfortably much from the heart. He sung them, too, sounding like Ian Dury. When I heard he died I was glad for him. For most people death is a shock, but it seemed like something that would suit Alistair, who had sung so passionately about one day going to see Jesus. I’ve every certainty he went straight from his everyday life to the bosom of Christ with minimal fuss, so I look forward to seeing him again when it’s my turn. I’m glad he didn’t have to be too patient.

An old flame of mine drowned in the Thames, near Embankment. I avoided the capital for a few years after that. When I did return, I went to Embankment, ostensibly to find a statue of General Gordon of Khartoum, which in the end I never found. That friend’s death was deliberate, and I’m inclined to light a candle for him whenever I’m in a cathedral. Not that lighting a candle has any real bearing on things. I didn’t know him well. I know he had a church, and a room in a bedsit, and unfulfilled ambitions, and heavy depression. I was very despondent after hearing about him, and blamed myself for a long time - though, under investigation, probably without much cause. Suicide is a bleak and terrible thing, and I think people come to it as a last resort, the only remaining option, rather than it ever being a choice. There are things I held against Daniel while he lived, but I cannot blame him for his end. I have hope that he too has found peace with God. There was an old idea that suicide was sinful, which I think is a disablist view that makes a bleak thing yet bleaker. I look to God for mercy, cos he is merciful.

A housemate of mine once move to America to get married. Before she left, she gave away all her belongings, in a process that resembled very much the disposal and inheritance of things from my deceased grandparents and my great aunt Elizabeth. Kirsten gave everything away, and then she was gone from the country. We went from talking every day to talking rarely if ever. I wanted to give her space in her new life, rather than pestering her with English concerns, but I was probably too reticent. Without consciously knowing it, I added her to my mental list of friends who died too young. A year or so down the line, at thanksgiving, I was enjoying a big meal with friends who also knew Kirsten, and as a surprise Kirsten herself was skyped in on video — and the prospect of seeing her speaking and alive, and as if in the room was such a shock to me that I ran full-pelt from the room, up to a corner of the loft and wept and wept. I don’t know why I was so extremely upset by the idea of a sudden reunion when I was so unprepared. Perhaps a collision of the idea I had been neglectful - as I perhaps had been of Daniel and Nicola and Alistair before they died — and the realisation that she did not die, and was alive and well and happy. To find someone is alive is no less shocking than learning that they died.

So, who’s next? Could be me, could be you, could be a friend or relative who doesn’t seem the sort to perish, but they all will. I’m not aiming to stir up anxiety, but acceptance. If we refuse to think about the inevitability and reality of death, it’s far, far more shocking when it eventually comes. I believe with utter confidence that there is a resurrection, that there is Jesus’ particular blend of justice and mercy. It isn’t done on merit. It isn’t about having done good stuff and abjured bad stuff, because everybody falls short, and nobody can be free from sin. It’s eternal pardon and eternal blessing, and it’s freely given to anyone who will gladly take it, because ultimately someone else paid for it, and he’s everbody’s lawyer. Personally I think the day of judgement will be no fun, but I’m looking forward to everything that comes afterwards. One day, dear listener, let’s all be dead together. But not today.