It was my oldest friend’s wedding
anniversary yesterday. As usual, and because I am the worst friend in the
world, I sort of forgot about it and sort of didn’t. After all, it has been
twenty years since he did me the almost unbelievable honour of asking me to
stand next to him as he achieved that thing which seems to have eluded me by
becoming a married man, and, several years later, a father, too.
After some discreet probing on a
certain social media site, I worked out that it was indeed twenty years ago and
thought that the very least that I could do was wish them a happy day by
popping a swift greeting into their inbox.
The reply I got, however, rather
took the wind out of my sails because it seemed that they were not having quite
the day they had planned. After being rather ill for several months, it seemed
that my friend’s father was finally losing his last battle which, as a former
Royal Marine, I would like to believe was a very hard-fought one.
As ever, I passed on whatever
platitudes I could and went on with my day whilst knowing that my friend and
his family were probably enduring one of the very worst days of their lives,
and knowing that friend is going through that all-too-familiar personal hell
that day meant that they all remained very much on my mind, not least because
it dredged up dreadful memories of watching another “last day” myself several
months and what seems like a lifetime ago…
Because, when this is happening
to you, you really do just want the world to stop and make it know and understand
the pain that you're going through, but, of course, it doesn’t and it can’t and all around you, all too many horrible things are
happening whilst you struggle when you hear talk on the radio about
ridiculously trivial things like “next week’s episode”, or “the repeat of
today’s edition”, because you know that the person you’re thinking about so
deeply might not be around to hear it, and you don’t, you just don’t, want the world to carry on as normal, and act as if
they haven’t gone, because that seems so unfair and just so not
right.
I was sitting at the side of a
road in a rainstorm when I heard the sad news of his passing early this
morning. I was trying to find an address that I’d promised to deliver one of my
late mother’s pieces of furniture to, and that was buried in a message on my
phone, so I happened to see the “red flag” of the incoming message but was
unable, for a time, to reply to it, despite being utterly pole-axed by it.
Much later on, I was able to sit
down and send one of those worthless-sounding replies where you struggle to
think of the right thing to say, but feel that you really should say something, even though it feels utterly inappropriate to
actually do so given the circumstances and the timing.
But it really is dreadful news to
hear and you really are so sorry for their loss and, for a time, it does seem
that a world without someone so who played such a significant part in your own
past in it really doesn’t seem possible.
It’s strange the things that you
remember when you start to think about someone who has just gone. I remember
being in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle heading off to the faraway lands of
Derbyshire on weekend adventures, and sitting on beaches in Llanbedrog in North
Wales, and incredibly organised filing systems, and so many medals representing
so many marathons run, and some balloons tied to a banister rail marking a
fiftieth birthday that now seems like no more than a blink of an eye ago and
yet, shockingly, is not really all that much older than the age that I’ve
reached now.
That family, who looked after me
rather a lot during my younger years, despite probably considering me not to be
the greatest of influences on their own offspring, have remained much in my
thoughts all day, and, whilst I know only too well that there’ll be a thousand
and one other things for them to be thinking about at the moment, I want them
to know that, despite the fact that I’ve not been that great a friend in recent
years, if my friend wants to just talk to someone outside the family, I’m
always there if he needs me to be and, when he feels ready, I really want take
him out for dinner sometime, if he wants to go, and spend an evening just talking about the old days, or
anything else that he wants to talk about, and raising a glass to the memory of
his father.
Funnily enough, I was only
thinking about his father the other day. Another friend was having a few issues
with her son seeming to have become a little bit wayward lately, and I was
remembering back to the days of my childhood and, most specifically, the Sunday
School I used to attend.
One of the key reasons that we
all grew up so relatively okay and (at least sort-of) well-adjusted, (despite, in my case at
least, the religious aspect perhaps not really taking), was the set of values that those people demonstrated
to us, not by any form of indoctrination, but just by the way they lived their
lives which showed us that, if we followed their leads, we might just turn out
alright.
I think a lot of it might be
because they were wise enough to give us those little responsibilities in life
like turning up to help load newspapers into the collection truck, or wash a
few cars to raise some funds, or help out by holding a spanner or two when a
boiler needed fixing.
Because they gave the impression
that they trusted us to do these things,
it helped us to grow up a little and believe that we were people who could be trusted, and that’s a great thing to have in your
life when you’re a confused youngster trying to make some kind of sense of the
world.
Mind you, perhaps with greater
wisdom than we appreciated at the time, my friend’s father was wise enough to
collect his daughter from several teenage parties far earlier than she would
have liked in those days. I’d bet she’d love to hear that knock at the door
once again just now, though…
Through such small demonstrations
of trust, however, we all learned that having just a little bit of
responsibility for what we did meant that we could be depended upon and relied
upon, and that, at least to my mind, is the greatest legacy which that
generation, as they are slowly and cruelly being taken from this life, have
left for us, and I hope that we lived up to that legacy so that they could be
proud of the people that we have grown up to become.
All the very best of wishes to
all of you, and, specifically today, thank you, Brian.
Here’s to you.
So very sad to here this, Martin. Obviously he had quite an influence on me too in my own growing up days. He will, I am sure, be sorely missed. He was one of those who I somehow thought would go on forever. x
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