Departures

People move into and out of our lives all of the time. Some welcome and some less so, but inevitably most of them leave. There was a time in my life when this concept was absent. Everything seemed permananent and nothing much seemed to change. I remember the day when this all became clear and I suppose that this must have been a first step on the ladder towards growing up. (I am still looking for the next one!)

I must have been nine years old when I first became aware of death. I was back home from the hospital/school and was told that a kindly old man who lived almost next door had died. It hit me that this was forever and that it would sooner or later happen to us all. The impact was profound and no death since then has had the same far reaching and mind altering effect. Oh yes other deaths have been far more upsetting but from that point onwards I understood.

As children, we were sheltered from death. No-one ever talked about it and when family members passed on, we were not taken to see corpses or to attend funerals. There was no attempt to explain - not even platitudes about people going on to a better place - they just disappeared - forever. Death became fascinating and I'd register each one as the elderly and sometimes young members of the village ceased to be. None of the deaths that occurred in my childhood were people that were in any way close to me, (Having said that, it would have been hard to find anyone that was close to me at that time) so my fascination was detached and morbid.

I was standing at a bus stop one morning and I overheard some village women talking about the untimely death of someone that I knew. He was in his thirties and married with a young child, and had died the previous day. The conversation was positively surreal and i almost laughed out loud when one said to the other -"What did he die of?" and the other replied "Nothing serious - just his heart!" For some reason that has stayed with me all these years

I visited the village recently and wandered around the graveyard. There were so many names there that I could put faces to, and yet few of them meant anything to me at all.

I remember being told of the deaths of three of my grandparents and my great Aunt and Uncle. I wasn't taken to any of the funerals and felt no sadness at their passing. My father's death came as a relief to me and although I did attend his funeral, it meant very little to me. I could only think that the religious content of it all was fatuous and totally inappropriate.

The first death that hit me hard was that of my young brother. He was only seventeen when he drove his motorbicycle into the front of a car and was killed outright. I was away at college when my mother called and told me the news. I was devastated. I couldn't leave straight away for a number of reasons and had to spend that rainy sunday in college. I walked in the rain, getting soaked to the skin and then secreted myself in the darkness of my room, unable to comprehend the reality of what had happened. When I did get home, no-one talked about what had happened, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and silent blaming, while each one of us dealt with the situation as best we could. The funeral was awful, and again there was the religious ceremony accompanied by the empty words from the vicar who barely knew any of us by sight, let alone by heart.

Mark is buried in the graveyard near to his father and periodically my mother will visit the graves and pull out the invading weeds. I go with her on my rare visits home but the masonry and inscriptions mean nothing. I know that I will not be joining them.