I have a photograph. It was 1996 in Lanquedoc. Though we didn’t know each other then, we were married in the same year, our families grew up together and we had that special friendship that remained constant through time and place and held together despite all the things that we could disagree about. We were celebrating our combined silver weddings and a kind friend lent us her holiday home in this idyliic village nestling in the Herualt mountains. We were sitting on the deck sipping wine and smoking cigars, while our wives were down on the grass, bare footed in soft cotton dresses, hanging up washing on a makeshift line between trees. They were radiant in beauty and deep in conversation. There was something about the scene and the stereotypical roles we had fallen into, that made us laugh. He leant over to me and said “That would make a good picture” So I took it.   

Now they are both gone. The second funeral was yesterday and the two things, the picture and the reality, simply do not fit together. None of it make sense. There they were, now they are not.  That cannot be. A person cannot just disappear. They must be somewhere, but where? They tell me it’s in heaven and I know that’s true, I believe it absolutely, but where is that? Please tell me. And when you do, please credit me with some intelligence by not telling that they are in the waves on the sea and the wind and the flowers and the butterflies. That won’t do. I know what a wave is and know what a person is and they are different.

The ceremony itself was painful. Almost everyone described it as lovely and uplifting. But I didn’t feel it that way. Maybe I am simply weird, but I find these services, that aim to be celebratory, positive and colourful with stories, memories and funny anecdotes, absolutely no help at all. Others clearly do, but for me the stories and memories only add pain to the sore. Memories are just that reminders of what you no longer have. Even the finest are no more than a sugar coating on the bitterest of pills.  I want to celebrate a life but there is nothing to celebrate in the loss of a life. The slide show of family pics all bright and smiling only added to the anguish. This amazing wonderful beautiful person of multi-dimensions is now reduced to just two. It’s not right.  Its obscene and yes, Maybe I am weird.

And I had a dream. Over the past nine months she has appeared in dreams but nothing special, just part of the changing script, but this was different. I was away at some group event when the cook was laying out masses of food to take for the trip that day. She was encouraging me take some, but I didn’t want any, I didn’t want to go on the trip and I didn’t want to be there so, uncharacteristically, without saying, I high tailed it out and was coming up a bend on the road with walls on both sides and there she was, coming towards me, smiling as she always seemed to do in the photographs I had leafed through. She was radiant with joy and happiness. I was so excited, I ran to meet her, lifted her high in the air and we spent ages chatting together. It was the kind of dream I remember having when young. The dream was so lovely I wanted to go back to sleep to get back into it, but, of course, I never could. Still the warm feeling remained and stayed with me and it is still is.

It was if she was trying to tell me something. It was something like “You must see It is so wonderful, you would not believe it”  or “You just have to let me go”. Maybe that was the critical think. With the picture and the dream, I think that is what I have to do. I have to let her go.