Let it go, and so fade away

I've waited a few days till I felt I had my thoughts clear on the topic before I tried to articulate them on the events of the last week or so.

First off I have to admit that I've never found myself comfortable in a crematorium. I know that may sound a stupid thing to say considering the reasons you find yourself in them but I've been to dozens of funerals in churches that haven't felt quite as cold physically or metaphorically as the crematoriums I've had the misfortune to be in. I don't think it's helped by the fact that, and I really hope you'll pardon the expression here, but that they're a conveyor belt for saying goodbye. You have your one hour slot and that's it, you have to leave and empty the car park for the next group of grieving families and friends. As a direct result of that prompting I didn't get a fair chance to talk to or even say goodbye to some of the people that were there that had to get back to work, having foolishly just assumed that everyone has the same free time as I do.

Having said all that the service itself was genuinely lovely and the eulogy for Alice Anne was not only funny but it encapsulated certainly what I thought of her and knew of her. That a life can be compressed into a ten minute eulogy is of course to leave out a staggering amount of what made them the person that each of us loved in our own personal ways but it was a credit to those that put it together that it made me smile through the tears.

In the period before we were shooed away from the front of the building I had to wait to try and catch people's attention so they could come over to me as being stuck in the wheelchair meant I couldn't just go over myself. I had been a bit worried beforehand that those who hadn't seen me in the last couple of years might be a bit freaked out by the chair and the tubes but if they did they hid it rather well. It was a self centred conceit obviously but I was so worried that me appearing to be sick on what was an already very traumatic day might have been upsetting to some. Not a bit of it though, I was treated just like everyone else and rightly so.

When I caught sight of the girls from school I got up out the chair to give as many of them a hug and a kiss as I could before having to sit down again. I even got a great big hug from Maureen's mum who I hadn't actually seen in years but who asks after me regularly when she bumps into my own mum around town. I've always had a soft spot for Mrs B as she's one of the few people who saw me in the immediate post bone marrow transplant period when I was still bald and had a feeding tube up my nose and she spoke to me like there was nothing untoward at all about that and never saw fit to patronise me the way plenty of others did. She just simply asked me how things were going so she could pass on news of progress to Maureen.

When we moved across to the function suite for the post service coffee and sandwiches me, my big sis and niece Maria sat with the girls who had remained and had a lovely chat about what was going on in all of our lives. Naturally I hogged the conversation a bit, letting them know exactly what stage I'm at in the pursuit of a new set of lungs and that I'm staying at home while waiting. I hope that I can get some of these new old friends to become part of my roster of visitors because it really was wonderful seeing them all again. Like it always was with Alice Anne, the years just rolled away and we talked like no time at all had passed. I'd love to hear more from them all about where their lives have taken them in the meantime though.

When time came to leave we had a brief chance to speak to Alice Anne's husband who was impressed with my decision to wear my Celtic tie as he felt she would have found it entirely appropriate and I explained the story of her meeting my parents up at Aberdeen and the press photo from it which raised a smile, but because my oxygen supply wouldn't last much longer I had to excuse myself from going to join the remainder of people from going to the pub. He said that was certainly an original reason for someone to have to leave. I got wheeled up to the car park and went over to see all the girls off by again making the effort to get out the chair for another hug for them all. I've always been a tactile person and these hugs were entirely for my benefit. I just about managed to stifle the tears.

I don't know if anything will change as we've all been living parallel lives for so many years but as I said in my previous post on the subject the friends you make at school are the ones you feel know you the best and force you to be the most honest with.

When I got home my mind was still racing with thoughts of Alice Anne but then after a couple of hours I hit a brick wall and thought I would just have an hour or so of a snooze and woke up five hours later. The day had obviously taken an emotional and a physical toll.

One of the things that I've had to address in this last week or so is that I'm not prepared in case something happens to me, so I've started to consider the realities of the many varied ways in which I could find myself shuffling off this mortal coil. This isn't a morbid pursuit, it is entirely practical  because I'm at risk every single day, whether it be down to the fact I'm so open to an opportunistic infection destroying what little lung function I have before I even reach transplant or the very real likelihood that something could go wrong in the operation itself, should it come. How to let everyone know is the main thing that concerns me and I want to minimise the trauma that my sisters will have to endure so picking people that need to be phoned and told directly and those who can disseminate the news through my friends from my time in Cardiff, Aberdeen, Belfast, Liverpool and here at home needs to be done. I also have to think about how I want to be treated. Honestly in spite of my not considering myself Catholic these days I think that the fact that so many of my family and friends are would push me towards having an entirely Catholic ceremony and burial. From preparing the booklet for my dad's funeral service I feel I have a notion of what I want to be read and sung at the mass, as well as who I want to be delivering the readings, carrying my body in and out of the Church and even lowering me into the ground. I have such a firm grasp on these ideas because of what happened to me a couple of years ago. When I was in the hospital and weighing only 41kg and dangerously close to my organs shutting down I had plenty of time to think not only about the likelihood of it happening, but also that I wasn't at all scared of it. In a chat with my ex Katherine this week I even admitted for the first time that there have been the odd few times where I honestly thought I didn't have enough fight left in me to go on. I'd never admitted that to a single soul before and I was in floods of tears telling her but having been reassured by her that it would have been mental if I had never had those thoughts I feel it's safe to share with a wider audience now. Anyway, those feelings passed and it turns out I'm incredibly stubborn and got through it and now I couldn't be further from feeling like that.

So, it turns out that the death of a dear friend has forced me into thoughts that I really hope people don't perceive as self-indulgence and take at face value as the thoughts of someone who is now just a little bit more aware of how fragile life is.